Full text of "After Iraq: The Search for a Sustainable National Security Strategy"

See other formats

NUCLEAR HEURISTICS:

SELECTED WRITINGS OF

ALBERT AND ROBERTA WOHLSTETTER

Robert Zarate
Henry Sokolski

Editors
January 2009

Visit our website for other free publication

downloads

http://www.StrategicStudiesInstitute.army.mil/

To rate this publication click here.

The views expressed in this report are those of the authors
and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position
of the Department of the Army, the Department of Defense,
or the U.S. Government. This report is cleared for public
release; distribution is unlimited.

This publication is a work of the U.S. Government as defined
in Title 17, United States Code, Section 101. As such, it is
in the public domain, and under the provisions of Title 17,
United States Code, Section 105, it may not be copyrighted.

Comments pertaining to this report are invited and should
be forwarded to: Director, Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army
War College, 122 Forbes Ave, Carlisle, PA 17013-5244.

All Strategic Studies Institute (SSI) publications are available
on the SSI homepage for electronic dissemination. Hard copies
of this report also may be ordered from our homepage. SSI's
homepage address is: www.StrategicStudiesInstitute.army.mil.

The Strategic Studies Institute publishes a monthly e-mail
newsletter to update the national security community on the
research of our analysts, recent and forthcoming publications, and
upcoming conferences sponsored by the Institute. Each newsletter
also provides a strategic commentary by one of our research
analysts. If you are interested in receiving this newsletter, please
subscribe on our homepage at www.StrategicStudiesInstitute.army.
mil/ newsletter/.

ISBN 1-58487-370-1

CONTENTS

Preface

Henry Sokolski vii

Acknowledgments xi

Introduction

Albert and Roberta Wohlstetter on Nuclear-Age Strategy

Robert Zarate 1

I. Analysis and Design of Strategic Policy 91

Commentary: How He Worked

Henry S. Rowen 93

Theory and Opposed-Systems Design (1968)

Albert Wohlstetter 123

II. Nuclear Deterrence 165

Commentary: On Nuclear Deterrence

Alain C. Enthoven 167

The Delicate Balance of Terror (1958)

Albert Wohlstetter 177

Excerpts on "Missile Gap" from General Comments on
Senator Kennedy's National Security Speeches
(circa 1960)

Albert Wohlstetter 213

On the Genesis of Nuclear Strategy: Letter to Michael
Howard (1968)

Albert Wohlstetter 217

111

III. Nuclear Proliferation 255

Commentary: Timely Warnings Still - The Wohlstetters
and Nuclear Proliferation

Henry Sokolski 257

Nuclear Sharing: NATO and theN + 1 Country (1961)

Albert Wohlstetter 268

Spreading the Bomb without Quite Breaking the Rules
(1976)

Albert Wohlstetter 301

The Buddha Smiles: U.S. Peaceful Aid
and the Indian Bomb (1978)

Roberta Wohlstetter 339

Signals, Noise and Article IV (1979)
Albert Wohlstetter, Gregory S. Jones
and Roberta Wohlstetter 357

Nuclear Triggers and Safety Catches, the "FSU" and the
"FSRs" (1992)

Albert Wohlstetter 374

IV. Arms Race Myths vs. Strategic Competition's
Reality 379

Commentary: Arms Race Myths vs.
Strategic Competition's Reality

Richard Perle 381

The Case for Strategic Force Defense (1969)

Albert Wohlstetter 389

Racing Forward? Or Ambling Back? (1976)

Albert Wohlstetter 414

On Arms Control: What We Should Look for
in an Arms Agreement (1985)

Albert and Roberta Wohlstetter 472

Arm^s Control That Could Work (1985)

Albert Wohlstetter and Brian G. Chow 501

V. Towards Discriminate Deterrence 507

Commentary: Towards Discriminate Deterrence

Stephen J. Lukasik 509

Strength, Interest and New Technologies (1968)

Albert Wohlstetter 524

How Much is Enough? How Mad is MAD? (1974)

Albert Wohlstetter 551

Bishops, Statesmen, and Other Strategists
on the Bombing of Innocents (1983)

Albert Wohlstetter 557

Connecting the Elements of the Strategy: Excerpt from
Discriminate Deterrence (1988)

The Commission on Integrated Long

Term Strategy 604

RPM, or Revolutions by the Minute (1992)

Albert Wohlstetter 613

VI. Limiting and Managing New Risks 623

Commentary: Strategy as a Profession in the Future
Security Environment

Andrew W. Marshall 625

End of the Cold War? End of History and All War?
Excerpt from an Outline for a Memoir (1989)

Albert Wohlstetter 637

The Fax Shall Make You Free (1990)

Albert Wohlstetter 639

The Bitter End: The Case for Re-Intervention in Iraq
(1991)

Albert Wohlstetter and Fred S. Hoffman 649

What the West Must Do in Bosnia: An Open Letter
to President Clinton (1993)

Albert Wohlstetter and Margaret Thatcher 661

Boris Yeltsin as Abraham Lincoln? (1995)

Albert Wohlstetter 669

About the Editors and Contributors 677

PREFACE

Three years ago, I received a phone call and then a visit
at my home from a University of Chicago graduate student
eager to learn about Albert and Roberta Wohlstetter. Robert
Zarate interviewed me for nearly 2 hours. It was clear from
the questions that he asked me that his interest in the
Wohlstetters' work was more than casual.

After Robert's initial visit, he called me again several times
to clarify and pursue additional questions. I recommended
other experts who had worked with or studied under the
Wohlstetters for him to interview. Harry Rowen, my former
Defense Department boss, was one. Andrew Marshall,
at the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment, was another.
Both had worked closely with Albert and Roberta at RAND.
Later, Harry and I contacted Joan Wohlstetter, Albert and
Roberta's daughter, and persuaded her to make her parents'
private papers at the Hoover Institution's archives available
to Robert. These papers are now open to the public, and
some of them are included in this edited volume. Robert's
visits to Washington multiplied as he interviewed more of
Albert's former proteges, as well as his critics.

In 2006, 1 asked Robert if he would be willing to help out
at my nonprofit research organization, the Nonproliferation
Policy Education Center (NPEC). He immediately agreed
and assumed responsibility for completing research that
had already been begun by Paul Lettow on the meaning
of "nuclear energy for peaceful purposes" in the Nuclear
Nonproliferation Treaty. Although Robert was planning
to write a comprehensive biography of Albert Wohlstetter,
I encouraged him instead to publish short pieces on the
Wohlstetters. His success here led to the next suggestion: an
edited volume of Albert and Roberta's key writings relating
to nuclear proliferation and national security affairs, with
commentaries by the Wohlstetters' colleagues and students.
I worked with him to develop a grant proposal.

The result is this volume, which is designed not as a
eulogy or a Festschrift, but as a testament to the continuing
relevance of the work of Albert and Roberta Wohlstetter in
the fields of nuclear and security policy analysis. Albert
and Roberta wrote hundreds of articles and studies on U.S.
policy on the Balkans, as well as the Persian Gulf; strategic
command and control; intelligence and warning; NATO
nuclear planning; U.S.-Russian arms control; strategic
and theater missile defenses; the economics and military
dangers of civilian nuclear energy; nuclear safeguards and
nuclear nonproliferation; and military nuclear strategy and
methods of policy analysis and design. Their contributions
to and influence in these areas of policy were considerable.
As a result, it simply is not possible to include in a single
volume all of the studies and writings that one would need
in order to cover the full extent of their work.

Still, publishing selections of their most important writ-
ings is worthwhile. Increased concern about the spread
of nuclear weapons in the Far and Middle East, the con-
troversy surrounding civilian nuclear cooperation with
India, the global revival of nuclear power and debate over
its economics and security implications, the controversies
surrounding how the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty's
obligations and rights are being cynically read by Iran and
other states — all of these issues have prompted Washington
pundits and national security analysts to cite the Wohlstet-
ters' work. The same can also be said of the security concerns
recently raised by Islamic fundamentalism, the continued
instability of the Balkans, the questions surrounding
NATO's future and America's alliances in the Far East, the
relevance of nuclear deterrence after the Cold War, and the
emergence of ballistic missile defense as a key ingredient in
strategic forces and alliance relations.

This volume can hardly cover all the insights that the
Wohlstetters' work might shed on these topics. Instead, it
is designed to make some of the most significant of Albert
and Roberta's writings — many of which were previously
unpublished — much more accessible. Using this volume's

references and its companion website, Albert Wohlstetter Dot
Com {www.alhertwohlstetter.com), readers will be able to view
some of the most interesting of the Wohlstetters' archived
analyses. Finally, Robert Zarate's introductory essay and
the subsequent commentaries, which have been written
by some of Albert and Roberta's closest colleagues and
students, should help to introduce the Wohlstetters' works
not only to current policymakers and security planners, but
to students who may later assume these roles.

HENRY SOKOLSKI
Executive Director
NPEC

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The Nonproliferation Policy Education Center (NPEC)
began work on this, the 11th of its Strategic Studies Institute
(SSI) edited volumes, early in 2007, when the Hoover
Institution's Archives at Stanford, California, made portions
of the Albert and Roberta Wohlstetter Papers first available.
Many of this volume's key themes were influenced by 3
years of research and interviews on the Wohlstetters that
James Johnson and Robert Zarate had conducted beginning
in 2003.

Among those to whom thanks are due, Joan Wohlstet-
ter— who made access to the Wohlstetter Papers possible
and gave freely of her time, recollections and opinions — is
clearly first and foremost. Also, heartfelt thanks are owed to
Harry Rowen, Alain Enthoven, Richard Perle, Steve Lukasik
and Andy Marshall, who contributed commentaries to this
edited volume; to the many colleagues, students and critics
of the Wohlstetters who offered comments and constructive
criticism on the edited volume; to NPEC's Tamara Mitchell
and NPEC alumnus Ali Naqvi, who provided invaluable
day-to-day administrative assistance; and to Ms. Linda
Bernard and the staff of the Hoover Institution's Archives,
who care for the Wohlstetter Papers.

Finally, without the help of the staff at SSI, especially the
hard work of Ms. Marianne Cowling and Ms. Rita Rummel,
and Ms. Kathleen Gildersleeve, of the Army War College
Library, this book would not have been possible.

ROBERT ZARATE
Research Fellow
NPEC

HENRY SOKOLSKI
Executive Director
NPEC

INTRODUCTION

ALBERT AND ROBERTA WOHLSTETTER
ON NUCLEAR-AGE STRATEGY

Robert Zarate

Given the quality of what has been recently written about
Albert James Wohlstetter (1913-1997) and Roberta Mary Morgan
Wohlstetter (1912-2007), it would appear that these late strategists
have exerted immeasurably more influence on the history of the
nuclear age than on historians. Nonetheless, Albert and Roberta —
for the sake of brevity, this essay shall sometimes refer to the
Wohlstetters by their first names — emerged as two of America's
most consequential, innovative, and controversial thinkers of
strategy during the latter half of the last century.

They were controversial, in no small part, because their
subjects of inquiry — questions of strategy, foreign and defense
policy, and morality in the nuclear age — often lent themselves to
deep disagreement. However, by engaging these questions, their
research aimed above all at rejecting fatalism, at refuting "the
belief that the holocaust will be on us unless by some desperate
act we achieve some improbable immediate drastic change
in the world order. "^ In their view, such fatalism underpinned
not only Utopian responses to the nuclear age's dangers (e.g.,
"One World or None" calls for total disarmament, dissolution of
national sovereignty, and world government), but also Dystopian
responses (e.g., preventive nuclear war). As Albert explained in
1963:

We are in the dark about the future of science and tech-
nology, still more about the long-term future of mili-
tary and political developments in the world arena. We
should be extremely skeptical, therefore, if sweeping
predictions on any subject come tied to a prescription,
an exhortation for urgent and sweeping action. We have
all heard the apocalyptic pairs of alternatives: "Destroy
the Russians or they'll destroy us"; or "Disarm or face
world annihilation." These are counsels of desperation,
fear of the dark. They abandon not only patience, but
intelligence.^

As a remedy to nuclear-age fatalism and apocalyptic thinking,
the Wohlstetters sought to identify and, when needed, to invent
and design prudent, pragmatic alternatives to limit and manage
nuclear risks — for example, to decrease nuclear war's likelihood
by finding ways of improving the U.S. nuclear deterrent's
survivability, controllability, and therefore credibility in the face
of changing dangers. Nevertheless, some viewed their research
agenda very differently. "He believes in learning how to fight
with nuclear weapons," Paul Warnke, President Carter's Arms
Control and Disarmament Agency director, said bluntly (if not
also reductively) of Albert's work on nuclear deterrence in 1987.
He continued, "I've never met a general or an admiral who really
agrees with that."^

Albert was also controversial because, in contrast to Roberta's
decidedly more subdued yet nonetheless formidable approach
to debate, he engaged in policy disputes, not in a partisan
or ideological manner, but rather with an analytical tenacity
and intellectual ferocity that gained many admirers as well
as detractors. As the venerable military historian. Sir Michael
Howard, would later recall of Albert's work on exposing arms
race myths, "Wohlstetter tore to pieces the thesis of the arms
control lobby, that the weapons policy of the Soviet Union was
dictated simply by the perception of U.S. threat, rather than by
their own very different agenda." But Sir Michael would hasten
to add: "His exposure of muddled, if not wishful thinking, on this
issue did a great deal of good, but in his pursuit of [intellectual]
adversaries, Wohlstetter showed himself at his most Calvinistic:
there was at times a distinct whiff of burning in the air."''

Yet that which made the Wohlstetters controversial also
helped to make them innovative. They belonged to a small circle
of policy-oriented researchers — a group that included Andrew
W. Marshall, Herman Kahn, William W. Kaufmann and others —
that established the intellectual foundations on which the field of
strategic policy analysis now stands. In particular, Albert, Roberta,
and their immediate colleagues forever transformed how those
who would later work on national security issues would think
and talk by introducing concepts like "signal-to-noise ratio" in
intelligence collection and analysis; the operational distinction
between "first-strike" and "second-strike" capability in nuclear
deterrence; "Fail-Safe" operations for nuclear-armed bomber
aircraft; and the basing of intercontinental ballistic missiles in

"hardened" underground silos. "To abbreviate drastically, Albert
Wohlstetter all but invented a distinctly military approach to
the military problems, or prudently presumed problems, of the
security and utility of nuclear forces," wrote Colin S. Gray, a
former adviser to the Reagan Administration. "Wohlstetter' s work
is on a plane of importance that is exceedingly thinly populated
with convincing rivals."^

And what made the Wohlstetters controversial and innovative
also helped to make them consequential. Although they never
officially served as government policymakers during their careers
in strategy, they were nevertheless able — through the clarity of
their thinking, the rigor of their research, and the persistence of
their personalities — to shape the views and aid the decisions of
those in government both during and after the Cold War.* In turn,
both Democratic and Republican Administrations recognized
them for their many policy-relevant contributions. In February
1965, Albert received the Medal of Distinguished Service from
Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, becoming the first ever
non-Pentagon employee to receive the Department of Defense's
(DoD) highest honor. In January 1977, he received that honor
again, this time from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
And in November 1985, both Albert and Roberta were awarded
Medals of Freedom, America's highest civilian honor, by President
Ronald Reagan. As political scientist Richard Rosecrance, who
served on the State Department's Policy Planning Council during
the Johnson Administration, would write in 1991, "Probably no
civilian strategic analyst has had more influence in the nuclear
age than Albert Wohlstetter."^

Contemporary Controversies and Continuing Relevance.

In the early years of the new century, there is renewed interest
in the Wohlstetters. One reason why is that although Albert died 4
years before Al Qaeda's September 11, 2001 (9/11), surprise attacks
and America's subsequent struggle against violent extremism,
several of his former students emerged as figures of consequence
during the presidency of George W. Bush. (It is worth observing,
though, that formal and informal students of the Wohlstetters
have served as policymakers in every Administration since the
start of President Kennedy's.)

Paul Wolfowitz, whose dissertation committee Albert had
chaired in the University of Chicago's political science department,
served as Deputy Secretary of Defense during Bush's first term.

and now chairs the Secretary of State's International Security
Advisory Board. Richard Perle, whom Wohlstetter had informally
mentored since Perle' s high school days, chaired from 2001 to 2003
the Defense Policy Board, a high-level panel of outside advisers
to the Pentagon. And Zalmay Khalilzad, who also earned his
Ph.D. at the University of Chicago under Wohlstetter' s tutelage,
served as the U.S. Ambassador to post-Ba'athist Iraq and, in his
current capacity as America's envoy to the United Nations, is the
highest-ranking Muslim in the Executive Branch. Broadly labeled
by some as "neoconservatives," Wolfowitz, Perle, and Khalilzad
would join Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Colin
Powell, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Director of
Central Intelligence George Tenet, National Security Advisor
Condoleezza Rice, and others in being associated with President
Bush's controversial arguments for war against Ba'athist Iraq.*

Another reason behind the renewed interest in the Wohlstetters
is the growing awareness of how their Cold War and post-Cold
War writings still speak to key challenges that America and its allies
are facing in the 21st century. With respect to Roberta's works,
one obvious example is Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision (1962),
her Bancroft Prize-winning study of the failures of American
intelligence and imagination that had preceded Imperial Japan's
surprise attack on December 7, 1941 — a study that has found new
relevance in the tragic wake of Al Qaeda's 9/11 surprise attacks. In
her meticulous analysis of the events and decisions prior to Pearl
Harbor, Roberta found that the United States had failed to foresee
the attack "not for want of the relevant materials, but because of
a plethora of irrelevant ones."' Decisionmakers and intelligence
analysts — the latter of whom were, at the time, decentralized and
dispersed among America's military services — all had failed to
distinguish the small, faint signals warning of disaster in Hawaii
from the larger, louder mass of background noise suggesting
anything but. Only in retrospect did these warning signals become
so obvious and so discernible. "Signals that are characterized
today as absolutely unequivocal warnings of surprise air attack
on Pearl Harbor become, on analysis in the context of December
1941, not merely ambiguous but occasionally inconsistent with
such an attack," she wrote. ^^ "Indeed, at the time there was a good
deal of evidence available to support all the wrong interpretations
of last-minute signals, and the interpretations appeared wrong
only after the event. "^^

This perennial problem of intelligence collection and
analysis — of identifying and pulling actionable warning signals

from the vast morass of irrelevant background noise — has come to
be known within intelligence circles as the "signals-to-noise ratio"
problem or, more simply, "the Roberta Wohlstetter Problem. "^^
The U.S. intelligence failures that preceded the attacks of 9/11
renewed public awareness of this problem, so it was therefore no
surprise that Roberta's Pearl Harbor study was prominently cited
by The 9/11 Commission Reports

Another example of the Wohlstetters' continuing relevance
is The Buddha Smiles: Absent-Minded Peaceful Aid and the Indian
Bomb (1976), Roberta's incisive study of how U.S. and Canadian
civil nuclear assistance to India during the 1950s and 1960s had
unwittingly furthered New Delhi's secret construction and
ultimate detonation in May 1974 of a nuclear explosive device,
sometimes referred to as India's "Smiling Buddha" bomb.^^ The
Indians had obtained plutonium for their bomb by using a reactor
that Canada had built for them to use (in the words of their
bilateral nuclear cooperation agreement) "for peaceful purposes
only," as well as heavy water to moderate the Canadian-origin
reactor that the United States had given to them (according
to the terms of their bilateral agreement) only "for peaceful
purposes."^' Indian government officials subsequently explained
away "Smiling Buddha" by claiming that the bomb's purpose
had been "peaceful," and that their construction and detonation
of this "peaceful" nuclear explosive device had therefore not
violated their understanding of the respective terms of the Indo-
American and Indo-Canadian nuclear cooperation agreements.
To Roberta, this episode plainly illustrated the need for the
Executive and Legislative Branches either to obtain unequivocal
terms and bilateral understandings regarding not only what is
prohibited in any agreement for nuclear cooperation, but also
what consequences shall follow in the event of a violation — or
else to decline an agreement altogether. Such insights from The
Buddha Smiles are worth revisiting and taking seriously today,
especially with Washington having concluded a new nuclear
cooperation agreement with New Delhi that would carve out an
exception in U.S. and international law in order to lift the decades-
long prohibition against nuclear exports to India that arose after
Smiling Buddha's detonation.

In contrast to Roberta's works, many of Albert's writings
have remained dispersed and often difficult for all but the most
determined and resourceful to find. As a result, those interested
in learning more about this late strategist— a group that includes

not only government decisionmakers and policy analysts, but also
journalists, scholars, and students — have not been able to read
his works first-hand. Rather, they have had to turn to books and
articles that offer second-hand (and, in some cases, even third-
hand) accounts of his writings. Such accounts, however, have
generally been incomplete, and sometimes have misunderstood
or even consciously misrepresented Albert's arguments.

In particular, when recent books and articles on "neocon-
servativism" in the 21st century have discussed Albert (who never
identified himself as a "neoconservative," nor was ever labeled one
by the secondary literature before 2001 or 2002^''), the authors of
these accounts typically have neither read carefully nor analyzed
closely his works. Instead, they have tended merely to cite passages
from his writings out of textual and historical context in larger
efforts to lionize or demonize today's "neoconservatives." In turn,
these books and articles, and those who read them, frequently are
drawing distorted and ahistorical conclusions about Wohlstetter
and his work.

"Is it too much to ask," wrote Sir Michael Howard (a military
historian who describes himself as a critic of Albert's), for someone
"to bring together [the Wohlstetters'] widely scattered articles and
publish them in a solid lasting form" as part of "the indispensable
nucleus of a strategic studies library when all else has been swept
away?"^^ The present volume aims to help answer that call by
providing readers not only with first-hand access to some of
Albert and Roberta's key published and previously unpublished
writings on strategy, but also with a fuller understanding of their
historical contributions and continuing relevance to U.S. national
security policy.

The remainder of this introductory essay offers the basis for
such an understanding by examining six key themes in Albert's
career in strategy, with attention to Roberta's impact on Albert's
work and thought. These themes correspond with this edited
volume's six chapters of selected Wohlstetter writings on nuclear-
age strategy and policy.

I. ANALYSIS AND DESIGN OF STRATEGIC POLICY

Albert Wohlstetter first entered the world of strategy in 1951,
when at the age of 37 he began working at the RAND Corporation,
a defense-oriented research organization based in Santa Monica,
California. So new and so singular a place was RAND that the

U.S. press would have to coin new terms — neologisms like think
factory and the more familiar think tank— just to describe more
succinctly, if not accurately, what this organization was.^*

RAND — the name is a contraction of the phrase research and
development— was very much a product of the political, economic,
military, and technological "cold war" competition between
the West and the Soviet Union that began as World War II was
ending. Recognizing the crucial roles that science and technology
had played in the Allied victory over the Axis, the U.S. Army Air
Forces (USAAF) in October 1945 formed Project RAND, the think
tank's institutional predecessor, as an experimental organization
to retain wartime scientific and technological expertise. Written
at a time when the American military services were struggling
to comprehend how the atomic bomb might affect the future
character of war and peace. Project RAND's mandate was
framed to encompass "study and research on the broad subject of
intercontinental warfare, other than surface, with the objective of
recommending to the Army Air Forces preferred techniques and
instrumentalities for this purpose."^' This broad mandate enabled
a well-funded, cutting-edge, and extremely flexible research
agenda that helped to attract some of America's brightest minds
in economics, physics, engineering, mathematics, and the social
sciences. Although RAND would gain institutional independence
from the USAAF's successor, the U.S. Air Force (USAF), after
incorporating itself as a private not-for-profit entity in 1948, the
USAF would remain RAND's main client for many years to
come.^"

During the 1950s, Albert's research on America's nuclear
forces would help to establish the RAND Corporation's reputation
as the center of U.S. strategic thought. His own journey to RAND
would be a circuitous one, however. Given his undergraduate
and graduate education in mathematical logic, and his later work
in manufacturing as well as prefabricated housing, it may seem
perhaps incongruous — even surprising — that he would spend his
remaining 46 years immersed in questions of nuclear-age strategy
and morality. Yet Wohlstetter would import lessons and insights
from earlier disparate experiences into his defense-oriented
research at RAND, and thereby shape his own unique approach
to the analysis and design of strategic policy.

Road to RAND.21

Born in New York City on December 19, 1913, Albert was
the youngest of Philip and Nellie Friedman Wohlstetter's four
children. Although Philip would die when Albert was 4, a close-
knit and cultured extended family — and the efforts of Albert's
eldest brother, who forsook university studies to work full-time —
would help widowed Nellie to care for her children. ^^

Raised in Manhattan's Washington Heights neighborhood,
Wohlstetter attended DeWitt Clinton High School, where he
showed an early and strong interest in mathematics, Latin, and
modern dance. In 1930, as the Great Depression was descending
upon America, 16-year-old Albert entered the City College of
New York. As an undergraduate, he concentrated his studies
on mathematical logic, and was particularly stimulated by the
writings of Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), a philosopher of
science whom he would describe in later years as "probably the
greatest American philosopher" and "a major influence" on his
own work in nuclear-age strategy. ^^ On the side, Albert would
participate in campus activities like the college's R.O.T.C.^*

After graduating from City College, Wohlstetter earned a
fellowship to Columbia Law School. There, he met a master's
degree student in psychology (whom he would marry in 1939)
named Roberta Mary Morgan, ^^ the daughter of Edmund Morris
Morgan, Jr., a distinguished Harvard Law School professor who
would later help to modernize the Uniform Code of Military
Justice. Although Albert would leave law school after only a
year, he would remain at Columbia to pursue a Ph.D., studying
mathematical logic and the philosophy of science, and working
with some of the era's great logicians, such as Columbia's Ernest
Nagel and Harvard's Willard Van Orman Quine.^*" While in
graduate school, Wohlstetter would take on odd jobs to help
support himself, and would even work for a time as art historian
Meyer Shapiro's assistant.

After earning his M.A. in 1937, Albert received several
fellowships to finish his doctorate — including one from the Social
Science Research Council to introduce modern mathematical
methods into economics, a prestigious fellowship that in turn
enabled him to intern for a time at the National Bureau for
Economic Research. However, when the United States entered
World War II, he halted his studies to work initially for the
War Production Board's planning committee as an economic

consultant, and later for the Atlas Aircraft Products Company as
a factory and quality control manager at a plant manufacturing
power-generating equipment for Allied forces.

After the war, Wohlstetter declined to complete his doctorate
and instead moved with his wife, Roberta, to southern California.
Except for a year spent in Washington, DC, where he served as
the National Housing Administration's Director of Programs (his
one and only official government position), Albert would spend
the rest of the decade managing research and development at the
General Panel Corporation of California. General Panel would
attempt — but in the end fail — to help meet the postwar housing
shortage by mass-producing the "Packaged House," a modular
prefabricated housing system designed by emigre architects
Walter Gropius and Konrad Wachsmann.^^

In February 1951, as General Panel was folding, Albert was
already contemplating a change in career, and even considering a
return not only to more academically oriented research, but also to
the East Coast. However, Roberta — who had been working part-
time in the RAND Corporation's social sciences division since late
1948 while at the same time raising her and Albert's daughter,
Joan— was intent on remaining on the West Coast. Toward that
end, she set up a meeting for Albert with Charles Hitch, the head
of the think tank's economic division. A Missouri-born Rhodes
Scholar, Hitch had served in the Office of Strategic Services during
World War II before coming to RAND. Upon meeting, the two
immediately clicked, and Hitch hired Wohlstetter on at RAND as
a part-time consultant.

Wohlstetter's Approach: Key Features.^*

During the 1950s, Albert would lead a series of highly
classified studies at the RAND Corporation that revolutionized
how the United States based and operated its strategic nuclear
forces. These studies (which the next section of this essay examines
in some detail) would also stand out as exemplary applications
of his unique methodology, a collaborative and interdisciplinary
approach to the analysis and design of strategic policy. (Although
Albert would write only a handful essays on methodology, his
most accessible work on this subject is probably "Theory and
Opposed-Systems Design" (1968), a version of which is included
in this edited volume.^')

First, Albert's approach sought to identify, frame, and answer
questions directly relevant to the decisions facing government
policymakers. Such decisions encompassed not only choices
among "means to accomplish ends that stand a good chance of
being opposed by other governments," but also choices among
the ends themselves.^"

In Wohlstetter's view, the ends of government policy could
run into opposition in a number of ways. Such opposition, of
course, could take the form of a conflict of aims between or among
several governments. "The ends of any government," he observed,
"are multiple and only partially incompatible with those of
other governments — even very hostile ones — and of course such
conflicts may be resolved without fighting." However, he added:
"A peaceful resolution may depend in part on the risks involved
in combat. "^^

Such opposition could also take the form of a partial conflict
of aims within one government. He elaborated:

While we may talk about national purpose in the sin-
gular, the first thing to observe about our aims is that
we have many of them. They are connected; some de-
pend on others; many conflict. Obviously two aims may
conflict when each represents the interests of a different
group. But even ends which the nation as a whole can be
said to share oppose other accepted national ends.^^

Albert thus highlighted the crucial importance of including "a
careful critique of constraints and objectives" in any analysis of
strategic policy, with particular attention to the cost-effectiveness
of availalble choices to meet these objectives. He explained,

A government's ends cannot be accepted as the final de-
liverances of authority or intuition. They are subject to
revision as the result of an analysis that frequently dis-
plays incompatibilities with other ends of that govern-
ment, or that indicates means so costly that the game is
not worth the candle. ^^

Second, Wohlstetter's analytical approach used theoretical
models, empirically-driven research, and interdisciplinary
collaboration to wade through the complexity and uncertainty
surrounding these problems of policy, and arrive systematically

at some partial order among preferences and choices of means
and ends.

Lessons from his pre-RAND experiences profoundly
shaped this approach. On the one hand, Albert's education in
mathematical logic and the philosophy of science had given
him an appreciation of the uses — and the limits — of quantitative
and qualitative theoretical models in capturing and explaining
real-world interactions and phenomena. On the other hand, his
professional experiences in wartime and peacetime manufacturing
had taught him the importance of moving away from the abstract
and grappling with the concrete. Indeed, he repeatedly stressed
the critical importance in his analyses of "grubby, highly specific
empirical work on technologies, operations, costs, and potential
interactions among states, factors that are plainly relevant for
decisions of the governments of these states — or for citizens
evaluating these decisions."^* Drawing inspiration from the work
of the philosopher of science Charles Sanders Peirce, Albert thus
sought to use theoretical models and empirically-driven research
in a heuristic manner: deductive theoretical models spurred
further empirically-driven research, the findings of which helped
inductively to refine and improve the deductive theoretical models,
and so on, in a method of successive analytical approximation.

In addition, Wohlstetter's professional experiences impressed
upon him the need to collaborate with and draw upon the insights
and creativity of experts in other relevant fields. Indeed, he
expressed pride in how his approach "required the cooperation
of several disciplines and, in particular, a kind of close working
together of natural science and social science disciplines which
remains very unusual, if it exists at all, in universities."^'

Third, Albert's approach aimed not only to weigh and
consider the received range of possible choices, but also to invent
and design new alternatives. He explained:

A central part of the inquiry must look at the current
and impending state of the art and at feasible and useful
changes. In the past two decades in which such inqui-
ries have grown up, nuclear, electronic, propulsion, and
transport technology have changed massively. The prob-
lem is not just to predict such changes, however. Since
this is a work of design, it must explore how — in the
light of interdependencies with military, political, and
economic events — the changes may usefully be bent.^*"

Indeed, he would remark in later years that invention and design
figured heavily in his most successful analyses of strategic
policy.

Fourth, Wohlstetter stressed the importance of being
explicit about the limits of one's analytical approach, including
the uncertainties surrounding the study. Yet he also noted that
certain kinds of uncertainty could be leveraged to make the
inquiry, inferences, and conclusions of the analysis more robust
and persuasive. He elaborated:

In comparing alternative systems with one programmed,
one cannot eliminate uncertainty, but one can assume
that they will be resolved favorably from the standpoint
of a dubious programmed system. One cannot avoid
theoretical simplification, but one can design a model
to favor the programmed or other losing systems and
to give them the benefit of the doubt. Then if the com-
parison shows that, even with all the favors bestowed
by the model's assumption, the system programmed or
otherwise likely to be chosen is vastly inferior to an alter-
native, this offers substantial ground for choice. More-
over, it should not be surprising that bureaucrats exhibit
enough inertia to make such a fortiori analyses possible
and very useful, as some opposed-systems analyses
have been.^''

In sum, Wohlstetter saw his approach as applying, in an
essentially Peircean manner, the method of scientific investigation
to the analysis and design of strategic policy. Moreover, he would
argue that his approach stood in stark contrast to the practices
of certain distinguished scientists, who would premise their
arguments regarding the proper direction of nuclear-age strategy
and policy less on the method of scientific investigation and much
more on appeals to their own scientific authority.^*

That said, Wohlstetter emphasized that his particular ap-
proach to analysis and design neither exhausted the possibilities,
nor could substitute for a capacity for fruitful inquiry. "There are
no methods certain of result in a complex field of research," he
cautioned. "None is proof against a dim awareness of interesting
problems or incompetence in formulating manageable and
significant questions."^'

II. NUCLEAR DETERRENCE

At the RAND Corporation in the 1950s, Albert Wohlstetter
would lead a series of highly classified studies on U.S. nuclear
forces that would evince his unique approach to the analysis and
design of strategic policy, and establish his reputation within
government circles as one of America's premier strategists.
However, it was not until after the January 1959 publication of
"The Delicate Balance of Terror"*" in Foreign Affairs — an essay on
the stringent conceptual and technical requirements for nuclear
deterrence that military historian Marc Trachtenberg would
later describe as "probably the single most important article in
the history of American strategic thought"*^ — that Albert would
be recognized as one of America's preeminent and controversial
public intellectuals of defense. Together, Wohlstetter's RAND
studies and the Foreign Affairs article would challenge what
decisionmakers, military planners, and policy analysts had
assumed about nuclear war and peace, and forever change how
they would think and talk about nuclear strategy and operational
policy.

The Base Study.

In May 1951 Charles Hitch, the head of RAND's economics
division, asked Wohlstetter whether he would be interested in
researching a problem that the USAF had posed to the think tank:
How should the USAF's Strategic Air Command (SAC) base itself
overseas? Initially, Albert saw this as a run-of-the-mill logistics
problem, but after thinking things through over a weekend,
he began to appreciate better how SAC's basing choices for its
force of medium-range, nuclear-armed, manned bombers raised
interesting questions and could have important implications.*^
Wohlstetter thus accepted Hitch's invitation and began a research
project that would later come to be known as the "Base Study. "*^

As the 1940s gave way to the 1950s, the political, economic,
and military competition between the Western allies and the
Soviet Union had intensified. Although Soviet intentions remained
unclear, its behavior had appeared at times ominous. After World
War II, Soviet-supported Communists had seized power in
Poland and Czechoslovakia. In 1948, the Union of Soviet Socialist
Republics (USSR) had blockaded West Berlin. In August 1949, the
Soviets had exploded their first atomic bomb. In 1950, the USSR
not only had signed a defense treaty with the People's Republic

of China, but also had backed Kim II Sung's Stalinist regime after
North Korea invaded South Korea and thereby set in motion the
Korean War.''*

Against this background, SAC's bombers, when armed with
atomic gravity bombs, constituted at the time America's main
military hedge against the prospect of "Central War"— that is,
of a Soviet conventional military invasion of Western Europe,
the nations of which lacked the political and military means to
defend themselves. In time of war or crisis, SAC's programmed
system of basing for 1956 to 1961 envisioned relocating the
bombers from approximately 30 bases in the continental United
States (CONUS) to roughly 70 overseas installations. Half of these
installations would be large, expensive "primary bases" from
which SAC's bombers would launch their offensive operations,
and the other half, refueling bases, but in general, all of them
would be geographically closer to the USSR than was CONUS.
Moreover, this programmed basing system was viewed favorably
by SAC, the USAF, and DoD, as well as by the Congress. Indeed,
just for fiscal year 1952, the Congress had already appropriated
$3.5 billion (roughly equivalent to as much as $30 billion in 2008
dollars) to construct domestic and overseas bases in accordance
with the programmed system.*^

With a team that would feature economists Fred Hoffman and
Henry Rowen, and aeronautical engineer Robert Lutz, Wohlstetter
set out to understand the relevant economic, operational, logistical,
technological, political, and military contexts in which to compare
SAC's programmed system of basing to possible alternatives.
Working in interdisciplinary consultation with USAF airmen,
as well as with engineers, physicists, economists, intelligence
analysts, geographers, and other experts, the Wohlstetter team
came to identify four critical factors for evaluating base selection:
the distances of a given base (1) to predetermined targets in the
USSR, (2) to favorable entry points into Soviet territory, (3) to
supply sources in the CONUS, and (4) to Soviet offensive airbases.
In turn, they examined how variations in these factors, when
applied to the SAC bomber force planned for 1956 to 1961, would
jointly affect:

• the costs of extending the bomber force's round-trip
radius;

• the Soviet military's employment of active defenses, as
well as the number of SAC bombers which Soviet fighters
could intercept and destroy;

• the logistical and operational costs for SAC's bomber
force; and,

• the vulnerability of primary operating bases and bombers
on the ground to attack by the Soviet's small but growing
stockpile of atomic gravity bombs.

Wohlstetter and company's Top Secret March 1953 staff
report. The Selection of Strategic Air Bases (R-244-S), concluded that
the preferred system of basing was one of a new — and much less
expensive — design that would rely primarily on bases within the
continental United States in both peace and war, and supplement
that system mainly with austere overseas refueling bases and, to
a lesser extent, aerial refueling.**" Although this alternative system
was not optimal for all criteria, it was a clear, across-the-board
improvement over the programmed system. When compared to
alternatives, it excelled in extending the bomber force's round-trip
radius more cheaply; enabling bombers to bypass Soviet defenses
and interceptors and reach enemy targets more effectively;
decreasing logistical and operational costs; and increasing the
quality and time interval of tactical warning, as well as lowering
the vulnerability of bases and bombers on the ground to attack by
the Soviet Union's growing stockpile of aircraft-delivered atomic
bombs.

Many in DoD, the USAF, and SAC initially and even reflexively
resisted R-244-S's conclusions. In response, Wohlstetter and
colleagues embarked on a briefing campaign of several months
to persuade policymakers and military planners of the validity
of their findings. In April 1954, they completed the Base Study's
Top Secret, 400-page final report. Selection and Use of Strategic Air
Bases (R-266), which not only detailed their findings, but also
recommended new measures and operations to increase tactical
warning of Soviet attack, and to better protect bomber aircraft,
nuclear weapons, and personnel within each base from the various
effects of nuclear explosions.*^ By that time, however, Wohlstetter
and company's campaign had already shown results. By late
1953, the USAF had accepted R-244-S's main conclusion, and had
begun plans to relocate SAC's primary bases to the continental
United States and to implement other key recommendations.** In
light of this success, the final text of R-266 was changed to describe
SAC's originally programmed system of basing as the formerly
programmed system.

Although the Base Study had implications for nuclear
deterrence's stability, it is important to recognize that the study
itself did not initially set out to focus on that issue. Rather, the effect
of sac's choices for basing and operations on the survivability,
controllability, and credibility of the U.S. nuclear deterrent became
evident only as the Wohlstetter team developed and refined their
study. Their follow-on Vulnerability Study, however, would
examine the issue of nuclear deterrence explicitly.

The Vulnerability Study.

In September 1953, around the time Wohlstetter and company
embarked in earnest on their follow-on study, the military-
technological context had already begun to change dramatically.
Both the United States and the USSR were increasing their
stockpiles of atomic bombs, starting to introduce long-range
bombers and more indiscriminately destructive hydrogen bombs,
and working to develop intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) .
Although Soviet ICBMs were likely to be extremely inaccurate, a
February 1954 paper by Wohlstetter and Hoffman projected that
if ICBMs were coupled with hydrogen bombs, then the hydrogen
bomb's powerful blast effects and very large "lethal radius" could
help to compensate for such inaccuracies, and enable even errant,
imprecisely-delivered ICBMs to destroy intended military targets
that were "soft" (e.g., airfields and aircraft, as well as unhardened
buildings and structures) with ease and little warning.*' The
Vulnerability Study thus would seek to understand how these
and other technological changes would affect the stability of
deterrence.

Prior to this study, U.S. military planners had assumed that if
the Soviets were to attack, their nuclear strikes — in a continuation
of World War II and Korean War strategic bombing doctrine —
would be aimed at American economic and industrial targets, as
well as cities, and would be so large and so direct as to generate
considerable strategic and tactical warning. Even historian-
strategist Bernard Brodie had shared this counter-city targeting
assumption. In his essays in the edited volume. The Absolute
Weapon (1946), he had called the urban city the "made-to-order
target" for nuclear weapons, and concluded that "the ability to
fight back after an atomic bomb attack will depend on the degree to
which the armed forces have made themselves independent of the urban
communities and their industries for supply and support." Brodie did

not think that U.S. strategic nuclear forces would be the primary
targets of nuclear weapons.'"

Working again with Hoffman and Rowen, Wohlstetter
examined not only these assumed "U.S.-preferred" Soviet methods
of attack, but also other attack methods that he would later
describe as lesser excluded cases. '^ In particular, he considered the
possibility of Soviet preclusive /i'rsf strikes with nuclear weapons:
that is, nuclear Pearl Harbor-style attacks in which small numbers
of enemy forces would try to fly at low altitudes, circumnavigate
America's radar-warning networks, and use nuclear weapons
to attack, not industrial targets or cities, but rather U.S. strategic
nuclear forces themselves — with the explicit aim of precluding
any substantial American retaliation or second strikes. (Albert and
his colleagues coined the now taken-for-granted terras, first strike
and second strike.)

In September 1956, the Wohlstetter team completed the
Vulnerability Study's Top Secret staff report, titled Protecting U.S.
Power to Strike Back in the 1950s and 1960s (R-290).'2R-290 found that,
even given the then-current range of low-to-medium intelligence
estimates of existing and future Soviet military capabilities, U.S.
nuclear forces could be highly vulnerable to attacks, especially
Soviet attempts at a preclusive nuclear first strike, because of four
central weaknesses:

1. inadequate strategic and tactical warning before Soviet
bomber attacks, and almost no warning before Soviet ICBM
attacks;

2. painfully slow and uncoordinated responses to any warn-
ing because SAC required hours — sometimes many days — to
assemble flight crews, aircraft, and munitions for combat or
evacuation;

3. ineffective active and passive defenses because forces,
personnel, and command centers were too locally concentrated,
and because facilities (e.g., existing aircraft shelters and depots
storing nuclear arms) could not structurally resist even an errant
atom bomb's blast effects, let alone a hydrogen bomb's; and,

4. a degraded or negated "second-strike" capability because
Soviet first strikes could destroy or disable many SAC bombers
on the ground, could disrupt post-attack communications and
retaliation coordination, and could easily level planned above-
ground ICBM launchers.

R-290's findings were startling and provocative, but Albert and
colleagues were careful to attach explicit and crucial qualifications.
They wrote:

The attacks described here, and many others studied,
clearly indicated the present vulnerability of our strike
force. They do not, of course, imply that a Russian attack is
imminent. Nor do we think it is. That is a matter of Soviet
intention rather than Soviet capability, and such intent
would be affected in the first instance by Soviet knowl-
edge of our vulnerability and in the second place by the
comparative gains and risks of alternatives to central

Conventional wisdom in the United States held that by simply
possessing nuclear weapons, a government necessarily acquired
an ironclad deterrent. The Wohlstetter team took aim at the
conventional wisdom by arguing that mere possession of what
the historian-strategist Bernard Brodie had once famously called
"the absolute weapon" was not sufficient. Their worry was that
if the weaknesses of America's strategic nuclear forces remained
unaddressed, and if the USSR perceived these vulnerabilities,
then in a time of extreme crisis the Soviets might come to view an
attempt at a preclusive first strike as a not wholly unreasonable
risk. As they explained in R-290:

Deterrence is hardly attained by simply creating some
uncertainty in the enemy's attack plans, that is, by mak-
ing it somewhat of a gamble. The question is, how much
of a gamble? and what are his alternatives? On the basis
of past experience, we would be taking a very large gam-
ble if we assumed that under no circumstances would
the enemy take risks. If this were so, the matter would be
easy and, for us, substantially costless.^*

In short, although a nuclear Pearl Harbor was far from inevitable,
in a time of acute crisis U.S. carelessness and complacency could
conceivably invite such an attack.

However, Wohlstetter and company stressed that, in efforts
to address these serious vulnerabilities, simply numerically
increasing the size of U.S. strategic nuclear forces would provide
neither an affordable nor an effective solution. "National defense

programs do not now give adequate consideration to the problem
of protecting the strategic force as distinct from the problem of
force size,"^^ they argued. "The criterion for matching the Russians
plane for plane, or exceeding them is, in the strict sense, irrelevant
to the problem of deterrence."^* Rather, Albert and his compatriots
maintained that the problem of establishing a deterrent that was
survivable, controllable, and therefore more credible in the face of
changing dangers required U.S. strategic nuclear forces to be not
only capable of riding out and operating coherently after an actual
preemptive attack against them; but also completely controllable
in times of peace, crisis, and war — and especially in the face of
ambiguous warning— so as to avoid unauthorized operations,
accidents, and war by mistake.

In turn, such controllability in the face of ambiguous warning
required that strategic nuclear forces be able to cope with the
operational dangers that attended /fl/se alarm, the belief that there
is a nuclear attack underway when there actually is not, which
could commit America to war accidentally; and false reassurance,
the belief that there is not an imminent nuclear attack when there
actually is, which could facilitate an enemy's preclusive first
strike.

Wohlstetter and colleagues held that if U.S. strategic nuclear
forces could meet these requirements for a survivable, controllable,
and credible deterrent, then this would increase the likelihood
that the Soviets would tend to view the choice of a preclusive
first strike as the riskiest of alternatives even ;/ Moscow should
somehow stumble into potentially calamitous circumstances.^^
To meet these ends, they identified over 50 operational measures
to limit and manage the many risks facing U.S. strategic nuclear
forces.^* In particular, they recommended that the United States
should:

• Extend the continental radar net's perimeter; relocate
and disperse bases deep within it; and install a "bomb-
alarm system" to warn immediately all SAC bases and
America's Continental Air Defense forces of an enemy's
nuclear warhead detonation anywhere within the basing
system.

• Establish better alert procedures; increase SAC's flight
crew and aircraft readiness for evacuation or combat;
and implement "Fail-Safe," a set of protective actions in
which combat-ready SAC bombers would evacuate and
disperse in response to ambiguous warning, fly along

predetermined routes, and return to base after arriving at
predesignated locations, unless given an explicit order to
continue on and attack enemy targets.

• Shelter personnel, bombers, fuel, and nuclear bombs
in facilities more structurally resistant to atomic and
hydrogen bomb blast effects; locally disperse and protect
these facilities within bases to take better advantage of
ICBM inaccuracies; and shield planned ICBM launchers in
hardened underground silos to make active and passive
defenses more effective.

• Secure backup civilian and military airfields in the
continental United States; and develop robust, survivable
command, control, and communications systems to
protect post-attack communication and coordination
with surviving forces.

Although the Vulnerability Study's findings ran into some initial
institutional resistance within the U.S. Government, the earlier
Base Study's successes made policymakers and military planners
much less inclined to dismiss the Wohlstetter team's conclusions.^'
Indeed, many of R-290's recommendations were eventually
adopted — though some recommendations, such as Fail-Safe,'"
took much longer than others for SAC, the USAF, and the Defense
Department to accept and implement.

Moreover, Wohlstetter and company's Vulnerability Study
inspired or helped to inspire others to develop technological
innovations that would later have dramatic, and even
revolutionary, impact. To take one example, the conventional
wisdom prior to R-290 was that structures could be designed
to resist — at most — peak overpressures of 30 or 40 pounds per
square inch (p.s.i.). Working with Paul Weidlinger, a Hungarian-
born engineer whom Albert had met in the 1940s at the National
Housing Administration, the Wohlstetter team disproved the
conventional wisdom: Weidlinger designed an underground
missile silo, the concrete and steel structure of which could
resist peak overpressures of as much as 200 p.s.i. In addition, he
showed that it was possible to design structures of even greater
blast resistance."

To take another example, in the late 1950s RAND political
scientist Fred C. Ikle, psychiatrist Gerald Aronson, and statistician
Albert Madansky developed the concept of what would later
come to be known as Permissive Action Links (PALs), with the
aim of preventing the accidental or unauthorized use of nuclear

weapons. In brief, PALs require not only the installation of coded
safety locks on nuclear weapons and missiles, but also the positive
assent of two people to carry out and execute sensitive nuclear
operations.''^ PALs remain widely used by the United States to
this day.

Yet another important example is the work of a brilliant
RAND engineer named Paul Baran. Wohlstetter's R-290 report
had helped draw attention to the Defense Department's severe
command, control, and communications weaknesses: for instance,
in the 1950s SAC communicated using extremely vulnerable
civil telephone lines that could be easily disrupted by a nuclear-
armed adversary in time of war. To remedy this problem, Baran
in the early 1960s came up with the concepts of "distributed
networking" and "hot-potato routing" (the latter is commonly
known today as "packet-switched networking"), with a view
toward creating more robust, secure, and survivable systems for
command, control, and communications. Baran's concepts would
prove essential to later efforts by the Advanced Research Projects
Agency and other organizations that would eventually lead to the
creation of the Internet.'^

The Delicate Balance: Deterrence as a Matter of Comparing
Alternative Risks. '"''

Drawing conceptual insights from his classified and
empirically-driven RAND studies, Albert Wohlstetter published
the article, "The Delicate Balance of Terror," in the January 1959
issue of Foreign Affairs that publicly took aim at the conventional
wisdom surrounding nuclear deterrence. His targets were
twofold: (1) the widespread belief in what his article described
as automatic deterrence, the view that an always-reliable deterrent
is an inevitable consequence of a government's mere possession
of nuclear weapons;*"' and (2) the belief in what was popularly
known as minimum deterrence, a more sophisticated version of
automatic deterrence conceding that nuclear forces require the
capability to survive the sort of attack they are meant to deter,
but maintaining that such capability is easily achieved with only
a few technologically crude and indiscriminately destructive
nuclear weapons.'* The article noted that these views were held
by many members of America and Europe's foreign policy elite:
"In England by Sir Winston Churchill, P. M. S. Blackett, Sir John
Slessor, Admiral Buzzard, and many others; in France by such
figures as Raymond Aron, General Gallois, and General Gazin;

in this country by the titular heads of both parties, as well as
almost all writers on military and foreign affairs, by both Henry
Kissinger and his critic, James E. King, and by George Kennan, as
well as Mr. [Dean] Acheson."*^

Wohlstetter countered that a survivable, controllable, and
therefore credible deterrent against nuclear attack is neither
automatically nor easily achieved. "[M]uch of the contemporary
Western confidence on the ease of retaliation is achieved by
ignoring the full range of sensible enemy plans," he wrote.'*
Automatic deterrers had assumed nuclear attacks against the
West that would target cities and civilians, not nuclear-armed
military forces themselves; thus, their image of a nuclear attack
was that of a nuclear-age extension of World War II strategic
bombing campaigns or a repeat of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, not
a nuclear Pearl Harbor. Minimum deterrers conceded that an
opponent's nuclear attack might target strategic nuclear forces,
but failed to appreciate how deeply-rooted systemic weaknesses
and operational difficulties in the face of a preclusive nuclear first
strike could severely complicate attempts at retaliation.'''

The fundamental conceptual point of "The Delicate Balance"
was that the credible deterrence of a preemptive nuclear attack
hinges on the would-be attacker's comparison of alternative risks —
that is, what specific circumstances a potential aggressor faces,
what alternatives to attack it perceives, and how it compares
the risks of attack to the risks of perceived alternatives in those
circumstances. "The balance is not automatic," Wohlstetter
explained. "It should be clear that it is not fruitful to talk about
the likelihood of general war without specifying the range of
alternatives that are pressing on the aggressor and the strategic
postures of both the aggressor and the defender."''" His crucial
insight was that, even despite the horrors of nuclear weapons, the
prospect of catastrophic circumstances could make the seemingly
sturdy nuclear-age "balance of terror" fragile, and thus make a
normally unthinkable course of action (e.g., nuclear preemption)
potentially thinkable.

To increase the likelihood of adversaries always viewing
a nuclear attack — in particular, a preclusive first strike — as the
riskiest of choices requires a nuclear-armed government to acquire
and communicate to would-be aggressors the acquisition of what
Wohlstetter stringently defined as second-strike capability. Such
capability demands much more than possession of nuclear arms.
It also requires the establishment of a system of strategic nuclear

forces — a system composed not only of nuclear warheads and
delivery vehicles, but also of personnel; command, control, and
communications; reconnaissance and radar warning; supporting
physical and operational infrastructure; and active and passive
defenses. This system would have to be capable of clearing the
following six operational hurdles:^^

1. The system of strategic nuclear forces must operate safely
and stably in peacetime and, in particular, overcome problems
associated with false alarms, accidents, and unauthorized
operations.

2. It must be able to survive and operate coherently after a
preclusive first strike — that is, after a preemptive nuclear attack
attempting to degrade, disable, or destroy it.

3. It must be able clearly to identify the aggressor, and to
receive orders to retaliate from the political leaders after an
attack.

4. Delivery vehicles must be able to reach targets on the
aggressor's territory.

5. Delivery vehicles must be able to survive attempts to
intercept them by the aggressor's active defense.

6. And delivery vehicles must be able to deliver nuclear
warheads with accuracy appropriate to the warhead's explosive
yield in order to overwhelm the aggressor's passive defenses
(e.g., structural hardening, geographical dispersal, and deep
underground emplacement of facilities) and destroy intended
targets.

Moreover, such second-strike capability needed to be maintained
in relation to — and in competition with — the potential aggressor's
own changing offensive and defensive military capabilities.

Finally, Albert stressed that even if a government could
credibly deter a preclusive nuclear first strike, that did not mean
it could also therefore credibly deter limited nuclear or less-than-
nuclear aggression in all circumstances. (Albert and Roberta's
work on Cuba during and after the Cuban Missile Crisis would
examine this issue further. ^^) In other words, a survivable,
controllable, and credible deterrent against nuclear preemption
could not substitute for a holistic approach to national security,
including efforts to improve conventional non-nuclear military
capabilities.

The essay's argument was controversial. "Wohlstetter puts
much emphasis on the circumstances in which nuclear aggression
would be, in his view, both rational and sane," wrote P. M. S.

Blackett (whose views "The Delicate Balance" had criticized) in
1962. "Wohlstetter's argument suggests to me that he has neither
thought very deeply or imaginatively about the consequences of
the nuclear war, nor has he ever imagined himself in the position
of taking the action which he seems to think it sane for the Soviets
to take."^^

However, Wohlstetter — who had derived his arguments
from nearly a decade's worth of highly classified research on U.S.
strategic nuclear forces at the RAND Corporation— worried about
the extent to which government decisionmakers would always act
in an objectively "sane" or "rational" manner. Drawing on his wife
Roberta's work on Pearl Harbor, he came to view Imperial Japan's
December 1941 surprise strike as highly instructive. On the one
hand, Tokyo, when faced with the prospect of eventual but almost
certain defeat, had reasoned that a daring surprise attack on what
it had correctly perceived to be vulnerable American naval forces
in Hawaii was the less risky choice. As Admiral Osami Nagano,
Chief of Japan's Naval General Staff, had explained in 1941:

The current relations between Japan and the United
States might be compared to an illness in which a deci-
sion was necessary on whether to perform an operation.
Avoiding surgery would [threaten] a gradual wasting
away of the patient. Great danger would attend the op-
eration, but it could not be said that surgery offered no
hope of saving the patient's life.^''

On the other hand, U.S. and allied leaders had tragically failed
to appreciate the alternative risks that were pressing down on
Japan and making arguably insane strategic gambles seem less-
and-less unreasonable. In a footnote to "The Delicate Balance,"
Wohlstetter recalls how:

... in an interview with the press on December 3, 1941,
Air Chief Marshal Sir Robert Brooke-Popham, Com-
mander-in-Chief, Far East, for the British forces stated,
"There are clear indications that Japan does not know
which way to turn. Tojo is scratching his head." As Ja-
pan did not have a definite policy to follow, irrevocably,
step-by-step, said Sir Robert, "there is a reassuring state
of uncertainty in Japan." ^^

Although Albert did not believe the Soviets were immi-
nently bent on a nuclear Pearl Harbor, he could not exclude the
possibility that, given the Cold War's vicissitudes, Moscow might
someday blunder into a calamitous situation, and find itself
contemplating a preemptive nuclear attack/* As he elaborated
during a private high-level dinner seminar at the Council on
Foreign Relations in March 1960:

The point is that deterrence should not be viewed as an
absolute. It is a matter of comparative risks. Under some
circumstances an aggressor might be faced with several
unpleasant alternatives, and we want to guarantee that
the most unpleasant always appears to be the risk of
making a direct attack on the United States. There are,
moreover, many foreseeable contingencies which will
put a great strain on the deterrent. For example, the Rus-
sians may be faced with a catastrophic defeat in a pe-
ripheral war. Or they may fear allied intervention and
support for a revolt spreading in the satellites or in Rus-
sia. Or, possibly, even more dangerous, we may have
suffered some catastrophic defeat on the periphery, and
they may doubt that we will accept such a loss.^^

Thus, in his view, a clear and evident second-strike capability
would increase the likelihood that the USSR and other future
nuclear-armed adversaries would view, under almost any and all
circumstances, a preclusive first strike as the riskiest of available
alternatives.

In Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision (1962), a Bancroft Prize-
winning book which was published in the same year as the Cuban
Missile Crisis, Roberta would describe major practical lessons that
had emerged from her study of Imperial Japan's December 1941
surprise attack:

We cannot count on strategic warning. We might get
it, and we might be able to take useful preparatory ac-
tions that would be impossible without it. We certainly
ought to plan to exploit such a possibility should it oc-
cur. However, since we cannot rely on strategic warning,
our defenses, if we are to have confidence in them, must
be designed to function without it. If we accept the fact
that the signal picture for impending attacks is almost

sure to be ambiguous, we shall prearrange actions that
are right and feasible in response to ambiguous signals,
including signs of an attack that might be false. We must
be capable of reacting repeatedly to false alarms without
committing ourselves or the enemy to wage thermonu-
clear war/*

In an application of his wife's insights, Albert's work in nuclear
deterrence had sought to identify the sort of posture, operations,
and technologies that would enable America's strategic nuclear
forces not only to function stably in peacetime, but also to ride out
and survive a nuclear-armed adversary's attempt to preclusively
degrade, disable, or destroy them — and by so doing, help the
United States deter safely and credibly a nuclear-age Pearl Harbor-
style attack against it. In "The Delicate Balance," however, he
stressed that maintaining such capability in the face of changing
nuclear dangers would not be easy. It would require "sustained
intelligent effort, attainable only by continuing hard choice."^'

In later years, some authors and journalists would erroneously
associate Wohlstetter with "bomber gap" arguments, and even
Senator John F. Kennedy's "missile gap" arguments. However,
through outreach like General Comments on Senator Kennedy's
National Security Speeches (circa 1960),*" a memorandum to JFK's
presidential campaign, Wohlstetter would try to clarify how
his work on nuclear deterrence had not only explicitly rejected
"bomber gap" and "missile gap" claims, but also refuted
arguments for brute numerical increases in U.S. nuclear weapons
and delivery vehicles as a feasible, economic, or sensible way of
preserving second-strike capability.

"The Delicate Balance of Terror" would be the first of many
Wohlstetter writings to publicly challenge developing doctrines
of automatic and minimum deterrence, as well as policies derived
from these doctrines. In the early 1960s, one such policy would
be a contentious U.S. proposal to share nuclear weapons with
America's allies in Europe.

III. NUCLEAR PROLIFERATION

Albert Wohlstetter's pioneering research on nuclear deter-
rence in the 1950s helped to establish his reputation as one of
America's premier and most controversial strategists. In the

following decades, his efforts to stem nuclear proliferation —
efforts which drew insights directly from his RAND studies on
the requirements for a survivable, controllable, and credible
U.S. nuclear deterrent — would serve to enhance that reputation.
During the early 1960s, he would work to debunk an American
proposal for a so-called "nuclear sharing" arrangement with the
North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and to promote
instead nonproliferation within NATO by convincing the United
States to make stronger, clearer, and more believable its promise
to protect Western European allies from any potential Soviet
nuclear and non-nuclear military aggression. Moreover, in the late
1960s and early 1970s, he and Roberta would conduct a sustained
examination of civil nuclear energy's military potential, as well as
of the degree to which national and international approaches to
nonproliferation were effectively constraining such potential. The
Wohlstetters' analyses would help not only to reframe nuclear
nonproliferation debates going forward, but also to change U.S.
nuclear energy and export policy.

Alliance Commitments.

After France's February 1960 test of an atomic bomb, U.S.
policymakers faced again the same sorts of worries that Britain's
October 1952 test had raised: How would the addition of a new
nuclear-armed government affect relations within NATO, especially the
cohesion among allies? Would other Western European governments
move to acquire their independent nuclear arsenals? Such worries
led some in the outgoing Eisenhower Administration to propose
that Washington establish with Western Europe a nuclear-
armed Multilateral Force (MLF), an expansive "nuclear sharing"
arrangement in which not just the United States, but all NATO
members themselves would multilaterally command and control
naval vessels manned by multinational crews and armed with
American-supplied nuclear Polaris sea-launched ballistic missiles
(SLBMs).*^ The hope was that the proposed MLF would satisfy
NATO members who were agitating for greater roles in Western
Europe's nuclear defense, and thereby arrest the impulse for more
governments to get nuclear weapons. The proposed MLF, it was
hoped, would also strengthen the sinews of the alliance.

Wohlstetter, however, opposed not only the acquisition of
new nuclear arsenals by individual NATO governments, but
also the Multilateral Force nuclear-sharing proposal itself. As an

outside adviser to the Kennedy Administration, he would help
to persuade key decisionmakers to reject both. In particular, he
would serve as DoD's informal representative to the Committee
on U.S. Political, Economic, and Military Policy in Europe, an
advisory body chaired by former Secretary of State Dean Acheson,
and charged by the Kennedy Administration to reexamine
transatlantic relations between America and Western Europe.
Albert would play a key role in helping Acheson to author draft
policy guidance for the White House's National Security Council
(NSC) that would aim to promote nuclear nonproliferation in
Western Europe through increased political, economic, and
military interdependence among the United States and its allies, as
well as through improvements in NATO's conventional defense
capabilities for resisting less-than-nuclear aggression.*^ This draft
guidance would form the basis for the Kennedy NSC's National
Security Action Memorandum (NSAM) 40.*^ Wohlstetter's article
"Nuclear Sharing: NATO and the N+1 Problem" — published in
the April 1961 issue of Foreign Affairs (at roughly the same time
NSAM 40 was approved) — provides insights into the sort of
arguments he made to the Acheson Committee.**

To justify the French force de frappe, proponents had made
use of doctrines of automatic and minimum deterrence. For
example. General Pierre Gallois, an adviser to French President
Charles de Gaulle, had asserted in Strategic de I'age nucleaire (1960)
that the destructiveness of nuclear weapons created uncertainty
for potential aggressors that necessarily "increases the risk,
counsels discretion, and consequently strengthens the strategy
of dissuasion."*' At the time, Gallois believed that the spread
of nuclear weapons to additional states would have a pacifying
effect: "As atomic armament grows more widespread and other
nations besides America and Great Britain gain possession of it,
either in their own right or under a 'double check,' the notion of
dissuasion will also become more common, each nation practicing
it according to its means."** Gallois added: "It will not be long
before we may have to give up war altogether."*^

In "Nuclear Sharing," however, Wohlstetter countered, first,
that the independent nuclear arsenals of France — and of other
allies that might follow the French example — would face, in times
of acute crisis, severe difficulties in deterring safely and believably
a Soviet preclusive nuclear first strike. Here, he was very much
informed by his earlier RAND Corporation research on strategic
nuclear forces, which had revealed how hard it could be for the
United States to establish a survivable, controllable, and therefore

credible second-strike capability in the face of changing dangers.
In his view, the independent nuclear forces of American's allies
would likely face an even harder time.

Moreover, Albert was deeply critical of how France's raw
desire for greater prestige had played a decisive role in its
acquisition of a nuclear-armed /orce defrapfe. He believed that de
Gaulle's decision would be a costly mistake with little real payoff.
In "The Delicate Balance of Terror," he had argued that "[m]ere
membership in the nuclear club might carry with it prestige, as the
applicants and nominees expect, but it will be rather expensive
and in time it will be clear that it does not necessarily confer any
of the expected privileges enjoyed by the two charter members."**
In "Nuclear Sharing," he elaborated this point:

The burden of deterring a general war as distinct from
limited wars is still likely to be on the United States and
therefore, so far as our allies are concerned, on the al-
liance. . . . The problem of deterring a major power re-
quires a continuing effort because the requirements for
deterrence will change with the counter-measures taken
by the major power. Therefore, the costs can never be
computed with certainty; one can be sure only that the
initiation fee is merely a down payment on the expense
of membership in the nuclear club.*'

Second, Wohlstetter worried about the effects that the spread
of independent nuclear arsenals or the Multilateral Force would
have on the Western alliance's cohesion and decisiveness. On the
one hand, independent arsenals not only were undermining the
U.S. nuclear "umbrella" guarantee in behalf of Europe's security,
but also were unraveling the interdependence between the United
States and some of its allies. (France would leave NATO in the
mid-1960s.) On the other hand, the proposed MLF would multiply
and dangerously complicate the allied decisionmaking process: In
the event of a nuclear attack against one or more NATO members, which
governments would have the power to decide when to use the MLF's
jointly-controlled nuclear weapons? Which governments, if any, would
have the right to veto such use? Just the U.S.? All participating NATO
members? What would the process for making decisions be? Simple
majority? Consensus? The answers to these critical questions were
far from clear.

Moreover, Albert was concerned that both independent
nuclear arsenals and the MLF would erode from within America's
promise to protect Western Europe from nuclear and non-nuclear
Soviet military aggression. He wrote:

[0]ne of the most serious troubles with moves towards
NATO or national nuclear strike forces is that they might
weaken the American guarantee in the future. If either a
national or a joint deterrent can really deter the Soviet
Union, it is hard to justify an American commitment for
this purpose. If European nuclear forces should pres-
ent merely a facade of deterrence, they might convince
the American Congress even if they do not convince the
Russians.'"

Third, and finally, Wohlstetter feared that the emergence
of new independent nuclear arsenals or the Multilateral Force
would set precedents encouraging ever more states, both allied
and hostile, to acquire nuclear weapons. In his view, American
policy needed to account not just for the "Nth" problem
country — that is, the immediate would-be nuclear proliferator. It
needed also to account for what he termed the "N+1 problem" —
that is, the precedent for or against further proliferation which
other governments would draw from U.S. policy toward the last
prospective "Nth" nuclear power.

Thus Wohlstetter argued that if the United States strengthened
its commitment to defend NATO allies from all forms of nuclear
and non-nuclear military aggression, then this would serve
to reassure allies of their security and interdependence with
America, and promote nuclear nonproliferation within Western
Europe. To that end, he urged Washington to retain sole launch
authority over U.S. nuclear weapons; to emphasize an American
"umbrella" strategy in behalf of Europe to deter Soviet preclusive
nuclear attacks against both the United States and individual
NATO allies; and to work with NATO members to develop more
believable conventional military options to meet limited-nuclear
and less-than-nuclear provocations. He explained:

The alliance is viable, because neither our allies nor the
United States in the long run can survive without it.
This is the reason for deliberately entangling our forces
and their dependents in the lot of Europe. We identify

our short-term fate with Europe's because we think our
long-term fate cannot be extricated from theirs. ... In
fact, the principal implication of my argument is that the
much used notion of interdependence has to be taken
seriously.'^

Following Wohlstetter's arguments, the United States would
work to reassure non-nuclear-armed NATO allies through
increased American security commitments to Europe, and to
convince them not to build independent nuclear strike forces.
Consequently, Albert's arguments against proliferation within the
Western alliance would earn considerable fame (and infamy) in
Europe. In a 1962 memorandum to the Department of State, Henry
Kissinger (who at the time was serving as an outside adviser to the
Kennedy Administration) would report the response of French
generals in Paris when he had questioned why they believed their
small and unprotected force would be capable of retaliating after
a Soviet first strike: "The generals replied that I seemed infected
by the pernicious Wohlstetter doctrine."'^

Although Albert also had helped to convince the Kennedy
Administration to bury the Multilateral Force for a time, the
proposal would die a slow death. Indeed, the proposal would
resurface periodically during the Johnson Administration, and
at times severely encumber negotiations between the United
States and the USSR within the Eighteen-Nation Disarmament
Committee, the multilateral forum from which the Treaty on the
Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons (Nuclear Nonproliferation
Treaty or NPT) would later emerge.'^

Civil Nuclear Energy's Military Potential.

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, as Albert split time
between his professorship at the University of Chicago (a position
which political scientist Hans Morgenthau had encouraged
and helped him to get'*) and his work as an outside adviser to
government, he and Roberta embarked on research to understand
better civil nuclear energy's military potential and economic
viability.'^ In late 1975, the Wohlstetters — along with their
colleagues at Pan Heuristics, a consulting company that Albert
and Roberta had helped to form — would complete the study
Moving Toward Life in a Nuclear Armed Crowd? for the U.S. Arms
Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA).*"

Styled as a "primer for policy," Moving Toward Life in a
Nuclear Armed Crowd? was written during a time when the U.S.
nuclear industry and many within government were aggressively
pushing for the domestic use and foreign export of spent-fuel
reprocessing and other plutonium-related nuclear fuel-making
technologies. Building on Albert's earlier work on nuclear
deterrence and nuclear nonproliferation, their study argued that
the prevailing interpretation of the Treaty on the Non-proliferation
of Nuclear Weapons was dangerously permissive, enabling and
even encouraging non-nuclear-weapon states to claim legitimacy
as they acquired nuclear fuel-making technologies, accumulated
fissile material (principally high enriched uranium and separated
plutonium), and came within months — or even days — of building
nuclear explosive devices. Moreover, although the NPT requires
non-nuclear -weapon signatories to allow the International Atomic
Energy Agency (IAEA) to safeguard and inspect their nuclear
materials involved in peaceful nuclear energy, the Wohlstetter
team worried that IAEA safeguards would not be broad enough,
intrusive enough, and transparent enough to provide timely
warning of a military diversion — that is, to sound a clear and
unambiguous alarm in the case of a state's misuse of civil nuclear
energy for nuclear weapons or unknown purposes sufficiently
early so that other governments could respond effectively before
that state acquired a nuclear weapon.

From this, Albert and company identified three main paths —
besides the outright purchase, theft, or gift of weapons-usable
nuclear material — by which would-be proliferators could obtain
material for their first nuclear explosive device. First, nations
outside of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty could pursue,
covertly or overtly, military programs to get weapons-usable
nuclear material. (As Roberta would detail in The Buddha Smiles:
Absent-Minded Peaceful Aid and the Indian Bomb, India did this by
taking advantage of unwitting Canadian and American nuclear
assistance.'^) Second, NPT signatories could cheat the treaty by
concealing from the IAEA weapons-related nuclear activities and
then withdrawing from the treaty after illegitimately obtaining
fissile material. Third, NPT signatories could declare all civil
nuclear activities with military potential to the IAEA, accumulate
weapons-usable nuclear material in plain sight and with an air
of legitimacy, and then later withdraw from the NPT to build
nuclear weapons.

This last path particularly disturbed the Wohlstetter team, for
it raised the risks of what they dubbed a Damoclean overhang of
non-nuclear-armed NPT states, for which:

the critical time required to make a nuclear explosive
has been diminishing and will continue to diminish
without any necessary violation of clear, agreed rules —
without any 'diversion' [of nuclear material declared for
civil purposes] to secret military programs needed —
and therefore without any prospect of being curbed by
safeguards which have been elaborated for the purpose
of verifying whether the mutually agreed rules have or
have not been broken.'*

In their view, the growth of such latent or virtual nuclear-weapon
states posed the fundamental challenge to nuclear nonprolif eration.
"The real problem of proliferation," they wrote,

is not that there are numerous countries "champing at
the bit" to get nuclear weapons, but rather that all the
non-nuclear countries, without making any conscious
decision to build nuclear weapons, are drifting upwards
to higher categories of competence. This means that any
transient incentive, in the ebb and flow of world poli-
tics, which inclines a country to build nuclear weapons
at some point in the future, will be just that much easier
to act upon.''

That said, the Wohlstetters and their colleagues rejected
fatalism regarding the spread of nuclear weapons. Such fatalism
sometimes found expression in phrases like "nuclear proliferation
is inevitable," a statement which mechanistically envisions the
further spread of weapons-usable nuclear fuel-making and
fissile materials, and appears to imply that little, if anything, can
be done politically, economically, or otherwise even to slow, let
alone reverse, the rate of this spread. "A fatalism which holds
that nothing can be done today may be an unconscious cover for
a desire to do nothing, to continue as before," they countered.^™
"While it is very likely that there will be some further spread, how
much and how rapidly is not a matter of fate, but a subject for
policy. "^"^

Indeed, the Wohlstetter team stressed that the world's
movement toward a nuclear-armed crowd is not inevitable.
"Although there is a real chance that many countries will take the
additional step and acquire nuclear weapons, it is not certain," they
argued. "There exist contradictory forces which may substantially
moderate the rate of acquisition of nuclear weapons. "^"^ The steps
by which nations decide to acquire nuclear weapons are "more
complex than the exponential physical and biological steps which
have suggested the standard metaphors of proliferation," they
continued. "They are not automatic, but depend on a complex set
of political, military, and economic conditions. "^"^

To balance better the aims of national security, nonprolifera-
tion, and energy security policies, they put forward a number of
prudent alternatives for limiting nuclear proliferation and man-
aging its risks when it did occur. In particular, their study urged
the United States:

• to strengthen its security commitment to and inter-
dependence with non-nuclear-armed allies, including
those outside of the NATO alliance system, and assure
them of their safety in the face of changing proliferation
dangers so as to obviate any movement toward getting
their own nuclear weapons;

• to interpret the NPT less permissively and more
pragmatically, using the extent to which the IAEA can
effectively safeguard a given type of nuclear material or civil
nuclear activity as a key metric for determining whether
or not Article IV of the Treaty's "inalienable right" to
"nuclear energy for peaceful purposes ... in conformity
with Articles I and 11" actually protects the material/
activity in the first place;^"''

• to evaluate transparently the economic viability and
military dangers of nuclear energy and nuclear fuel-
making;

• to limit government energy subsidies and loan guarantees
not only to the nuclear industry, but also to other energy
industries, so as to enable all energy alternatives — nuclear,
fossil fuels, natural gas, cleaner coal, and renewables — to
compete on a neutral, market-driven playing field;

• to establish stringent domestic and international controls
on the export and use of fissile material and fuel-making
technologies; and

• to work both with the IAEA and with other governments
to revise and adequately fund the Agency's safeguards
system so that it could have a better chance of providing
timely warning of a state's close approach to nuclear
weapons capability.

With this and later studies/"^ Wohlstetter and colleagues
worked with the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency's
director Fred C. Ikle, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's
Victor Gilinsky, and others, to forge a consensus in Washington
regarding the dubious economic rationales for, and the military
dangers of, hitherto encouraged weapons-relevant nuclear
activities — in particular, the use and export of plutonium-based
fuel and fuel-making technologies.

Partial yet nontrivial changes to America's energy and export
policies followed. In October 1976, President Ford decided to
defer America's commercial use and export of plutonium-related
fuel and fuel-making capabilities, and to call for an international
moratorium on the export of plutonium reprocessing and uranium
enrichment technologies.^"* (Ford's deferral decision effectively
killed earlier proposals to export nuclear fuel-making technologies
to the government of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in Iran.^"^)
In April 1977, President Carter made Ford's deferral indefinite.^"*
And in 1978, the Congress passed the Nuclear 'Non-proliferation
Act (P.L. 95-242), which among other things established stricter
guidelines for U.S nuclear cooperation with and nuclear exports
to other governments.^"' As Atomic Industrial Forum president
Carl Walske — who, as the nuclear industry's chief representative,
had vehemently opposed such changes to U.S. policy — would
grudgingly concede:

The most significant single event [in the current call for
change], in my view, was the appearance in December
1975 of Albert Wohlstetter's study for the U.S. Arms
Control and Disarmament Agency entitled. Moving To-
ward Life in a Nuclear Armed Crowd?'^'^°

Significant revisions to international nonproliferation controls
would not follow, however. Although nuclear proliferation would
often take a backseat to the larger struggle between the West and
the Soviet bloc, proliferation problems would come to dominate
U.S. foreign policy after the Cold War's end, especially in the early
years of the 21st century.

IV. ARMS RACE MYTHS VS. STRATEGIC COMPETITION'S
REALITY

In the late 1960s, as Albert Wohlstetter expanded the scope
of his nonproliferation research, he also became increasingly
involved in heated policy debates over whether the United States
should qualitatively improve the capabilities of its strategic
nuclear forces.

Many proponents of arms control opposed qualitative
improvements. They premised their arguments on automatic
deterrence and minimum deterrence, doctrines holding that
a government could easily and reliably deter a wide range of
aggression against it merely by possessing a few technologically
crude nuclear weapons which, in the event of an attack, would
be used against an aggressor's cities and civilian populations.
Moreover, arms controllers typically believed that worst-case
analyses were leading the United States to pursue qualitative
nuclear improvements that would go far bey ond a mere " minimum
deterrent" nuclear posture. In their view, such innovations were
activating an action-reaction dynamic that was forcing the USSR —
which many arms controllers believed wanted only a "minimum
deterrent" — to engage in a nuclear arms race with the United
States, one that was spiraling out of control, exacerbating bilateral
tensions, and increasing the likelihood of war.

In contrast, Wohlstetter (along with other like-minded
strategists) supported military-technological innovation. A
longtime skeptic of automatic and minimum deterrence, he held
that a government's mere possession of nuclear weapons did not
guarantee a survivable, controllable, and credible deterrent against
a nuclear first strike; rather, the requirements for a system of
nuclear forces capable of providing such a deterrent were far more
stringent. Moreover, he countered that an action-reaction dynamic
was not inexorably governing strategic competition in general,
nor Soviet nuclear-weapons development and procurement
decisions in particular; and that qualitative improvements would
not invariably lead to spiraling arms races and increased tension,
let alone to a greater likelihood of war. Indeed, Albert believed
that some technological innovations would tend to encourage
stability.

These largely opposing views would clash publicly in
1969, when the Senate deliberated over whether to approve the

initial deployment of the Safeguard antiballistic missile (ABM)
defense system.^" In the mid-1970s, the aftermath of the ABM
debate would inspire Wohlstetter to study systematically the
history of the U.S. and USSR's strategic competition in nuclear
arms. That study's conclusions would lead him to criticize the
arm controllers' claims of inevitable worst-casing, of immutable
action-reaction dynamics, and of consequent spiraling arms races
as muddled myths that were driving a Luddite approach to arms
control. The Wohlstetters and their colleagues would articulate
as a better alternative an approach to arms control derived from
what they considered to be a more nuanced understanding of
strategic competition.

The 1969 ABM Debate.

A revised version of the Johnson Administration's Sentinel
ABM program, the Nixon Administration's Safeguard program
envisioned using nuclear-tipped missile interceptors to defend
U.S. land-based strategic forces as well as the nation's political and
military leaders against attacks by Soviet nuclear-armed ICBMs
and SLBMs. It also sought to protect population centers against
either the accidental or unauthorized launch of an adversary's
ICBM or SLBM, or a deliberate but numerically small missile attack
by nascent nuclear-armed governments like the People's Republic
of China. Safeguard was therefore called a "thin" ABM system
because it was intended to defend mainly military and leadership
targets and provide only limited protection to civilians — a sharp
contrast to the more ambitious "thick" ABM systems that would
try to defend most or all of America's civilian population from
very large missile attacks. In the early 1960s, the Soviet Union had
already begun developing the so-called A-35, a comparable "thin"
ABM system using nuclear-tipped Galosh missile interceptors,
with the aim of protecting political-military leaders in Moscow
from attack.

In the Senate, prominent Safeguard opponents included
Stuart Symington (D-MO) and Edward Kennedy (D-MA), as
well as Senate Foreign Relations Committee chair J. William
Fulbright (D-AR). Outside anti-ABM experts included Jerome
Wiesner and George Rathjens, both of the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology; former State Department legal adviser Abram
Chayes of Harvard Law School; and Wolfgang Panofsky of the
Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. Some of these experts would
form advocacy groups to assist the anti-ABM senators.

Prominent Safeguard supporters included Senate Armed
Services Committee chair John Stennis (D-MS) and Senate
Subcommittee on National Security and International Operations
chair Henry "Scoop" Jackson (D-WA), as well as the Pentagon's
Director of Defense Research and Engineering, Johnny Foster.
Outside pro-ABM experts included Albert Wohlstetter, now a
professor at the University of Chicago; former Secretary of State
Dean Acheson; and former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul
Nitze. These three would join together to form the Committee
to Maintain a Prudent Defense Policy, a group that would
seek to provide pro-ABM senators with analytic support. (Paul
Wolfowitz and Peter Wilson, both of whom were at the time
doctoral candidates at the University of Chicago, and Richard
Perle, a graduate student at Princeton, would help to staff this
group.)

During Senate hearings on the ABM, opponents raised
three main objections. First, they asserted that anticipated Soviet
strategic nuclear forces would not be capable of knocking out
America's land-based second-strike capability, therefore obviating
one of Safeguard's stated purposes. In particular, George Rathjens
submitted to the Congress an analysis calculating that any
attempts at a preclusive nuclear first strike by the Soviets would
destroy, at the most, three-quarters of America's land-based
Minuteman ICBMs.^^^ Moreover, Jerome Wiesner charged that
ABM proponents were using worst-case scenarios to strengthen
their argument. "We always underestimate our own capabilities
and overestimate those of the other fellow," Wiesner later claimed
in an essay on the ABM."^

Second, they argued that qualitative improvements — not only
active defense systems like the ABM, but also efforts to develop
multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle (MIRV) systems
and to improve the delivery accuracy of ICBMs and other nuclear-
armed delivery vehicles — would necessarily spark spiraling and
therefore destabilizing arms races. To halt what they saw as the
action-reaction dynamic governing the strategic competition
between the United States and USSR, they called for arms control
agreements that would quantitatively cap American and Soviet
strategic nuclear forces, and prohibit qualitative improvements to
military nuclear technologies.

Third, anti-ABM experts claimed that the United States, at
any rate, had cheaper and more effective ways than the ABM to
protect its second-strike capability. For example, Rathjens held
that a brute increase in the numbers of American ICBMs would

be a better alternative than Safeguard. Senator Fulbright even
suggested that a "launch-on-warning" nuclear posture would
render the ABM unnecessary and provide what he described as
"the greatest deterrence." The Senator explained:

It would seem to me that assurance, the knowledge that
these ICBMs, even part of them, would be released im-
mediately without any fiddling around about it, even
without asking the computer what to do, it would be the
greatest deterrence in the world. ^^^

Indeed, as ABM opponent Ralph Lapp would reiterate in The New
York Times: "As Senator Fulbright pointed out, empty holes [of the
ICBMs that would be launched on warning of an attack] may be
our most powerful deterrent weapon.""^

At an April 1969 hearing of the Senate Armed Services
Committee, Wohlstetter issued a forceful rejoinder to these
Safeguard opponents. First, he challenged claims that anticipated
Soviet strategic nuclear forces would be wholly incapable of
launching a nuclear first strike to preclude substantially an Ameri-
can second strike by U.S. land-based ICBMs. In particular,
Albert criticized Rathjens' analysis, charging that he had found sig-
nificant methodological errors and distortions of intelligence esti-
mates when he had tried to replicate Rathjens' calculations."*

(After the hearing, Wohlstetter and Rathjens' increasingly
acerbic exchanges would spill onto the opinion pages of The New
York Times and other forums. In July 1971, a special committee
appointed by the Operations Research Society of America's
president would release a detailed peer review of the Wohlstetter-
Rathjens debate. This peer review — the idea for which was
adamantly opposed by Rathjens, Wiesner et al. — would come out
in favor of Wohlstetter's analysis as well as of his criticisms of
the anti-ABM opponents."^ In particular, the peer review would
conclude that the analyses of the anti-ABM experts "were often
inappropriate, misleading, or factually in error.""* The Society's
findings would do little to quell Wohlstetter and Rathjens'
increasingly bitter dispute, however.)

Second, Wohlstetter countered claims that Safeguard would
necessarily start a spiraling race in nuclear arms or arms spending.
"Indeed, despite the stereotype," he said of the U.S. spending on
nuclear arms during the 1960s, "there has been no quantitative
arms race in the strategic offense and defense budget, no 'ever-

accelerating increase/ nor, in fact, any long-term increase at all."^^'
(As this essay details below, the Wohlstetters and their colleagues
would conduct a study in the 1970s detailing this point.)

Third, Albert argued that Safeguard would be a cheaper and
less destabilizing way than brute numerical increases of America's
nuclear arsenal to protect land-based U.S. second-strike capability
against Soviet strategic nuclear forces — forces which were likely
to add more accurate ICBMs with modest MIRVed warhead
capability. He elaborated:

There is an important difference between making quali-
tative adjustments to technical change and expanding
the number of vehicles or megatons or dollars spent.
The difference has been ignored in a debate on ABM that
seems at the same time impassioned and very abstract,
quite removed from the concrete political, economic,
and military realities of nuclear offense and defense and
their actual history. ^^^

He continued:

For example, one alternative to protecting Minuteman
[land-based ICBMs] is to buy more Minutemen without
protection. But adding new vehicles is costly and more
destabilizing than an active defense of these hard points,
since it increases the capacity to strike first. A one-sided
self-denial of new technology can lead simply to mul-
tiplying our missiles and budgets, or to a decrease in
safety, or to both.^^^

Indeed, in the Base and Vulnerability Studies that Wohlstetter
had led at the RAND Corporation during the 1950s, qualitative
technological improvements had figured heavily in efforts to
protect U.S. second-strike capability without having to resort
to destabilizing quantitative increases in the nuclear arsenal. In
particular, his research team had leveraged the breakthrough
designs of a brilliant engineer named Paul Weidlinger to show that
it was indeed possible to shelter and passively defend ICBMs and
command-and-control facilities by building complex underground
structures that were orders of magnitude more resistant to the
blast effects of nuclear explosions than most engineers had ever
thought possible. ^^^ In Albert's view, active defense programs like

the ABM fell into a long line of useful and stabilizing qualitative
improvements to the capabilities of U.S. strategic nuclear forces.

On a related note, Wohlstetter was deeply critical of statements
by Senator Fulbright and others promoting "launch-on-warning"
as an actual operational policy. Albert found "launch-on-warning"
to be deeply dangerous and politically irresponsible:

The revival today, by several distinguished senators and
some able physicists opposing ABM, of the suggestion
that, rather than defend ICBM's, we should launch them
at Russian cities simply on the basis of radar represents
a long step backward. If we were willing to do this, we
would dispense with silos or Poseidon submarines or any
other mode of protecting our missiles. And we would
increase the nightmare possibility of nuclear war by mis-
take. ^^^

The fierce debate between the pro- and anti-ABM crowds
would continue into the summer of '69. In August, the Senate
would end up approving the initial deployment of Safeguard, with
Vice President Spiro Agnew casting the deciding vote to break the
Senate's 50-to-50 split. However, 3 years later, at the end of the first
round of the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT), the Nixon
Administration would conclude with the Soviets an agreement
severely limiting deployments of ballistic missile defense. ^^* The
ABM Treaty of May 1972 initially allowed the United States and
USSR each to field two ABM sites, but was later modified in July
1974 to allow each country only one site.

The United States worked to finish its Safeguard site in North
Dakota, but Congress voted to shut it down in late 1975."^ In
contrast, the Soviets would continue to field the A-35 ABM system
near Moscow that they had first begun installing in the early 1960s.
(Today, the Russian Federation now fields the A-135, an updated
version of the A-35 that relies on missile interceptors tipped with
non-nuclear explosives, while at the same time opposing U.S. and
European Union efforts to build a "thin" ABM system to defend
against ballistic missile threats from Iran and other rogue states.)

Strategic Nuclear Competition: Rivalry, But No Race.

As the 1960s gave way to the 1970s, controversies over the
wisdom of incorporating technological innovations in U.S.
strategic nuclear forces intensified. One key issue was whether

the United States should try to improve the accuracy with which
nuclear-armed delivery vehicles could be delivered to their
intended military targets, even if the purpose was to decrease the
possibility of harm to civilian noncombatants.

Echoing their earlier arguments against the ABM, advocates of
arms control charged that such technological innovations would
inevitably spark new arms races. They held that the United States,
which was wrongly alarmed by worst-case analyses, was pursuing
technological military innovations that, in turn, were activating
the action-reaction dynamic that governs military competition,
and inexorably leads to spiraling arms races characterized by
increased defense spending, larger and more destructive nuclear
arsenals, and a greater likelihood of war. Again, arms controllers
called for new treaties that would limit qualitative technological
improvements to strategic nuclear forces.

It was in this context that Albert and Roberta Wohlstetter,
along with colleagues at their Pan Heuristics consulting company,
set out to study the history of how the United States and USSR
had competed in strategic nuclear arms. Their research aimed
to determine the extent to which the American-Soviet strategic
nuclear rivalry actually had conformed to the concept of a
spiraling arms race.

The Wohlstetters and their colleagues began by observing
that arms control advocates often had not carefully and precisely
defined what they meant by the concept, arms race. They found that
while arms race resonated with powerful emotional and pejorative
connotations, the term typically had only vague, and sometimes
confusing, denotations. In "Is There a Strategic Arms Race?" part
one of his controversial two-part essay in Foreign Policy (1974),
Albert expanded on this point:

and its resistance to accidental or unauthorized use?
When we talk of a "race" what do we imply about the
rate at which the race is run, about the ostensible goal of
the contest, about how the "race" is generated, about the
nature of the interaction among strategic adversaries?^^*

With the concept of arms races, arms controllers had sought
to lay bare the action-reaction dynamic that underlay the strategic
nuclear competition between the United States and USSR. Albert,
however, was deeply skeptical of the notion behind this dynamic.
He wrote:

The very phrase "action-reaction" has an aura of me-
chanical inevitability. Like Newton's Third Law: For
Every Action There Is An Equal and Opposite Reaction.
Only here, since the mechanism is explosive, it seems the
law is supposed to read: For Every Action There Is An
Opposing Greater-Than-Equal Reaction.^^''

Wohlstetter and company acknowledged the concept of spiraling
arms races had correctly demonstrated that one government's
military decisions may have a partial impact on the decisions of
another. However, they believed that spiraling arms races grossly
overstated the extent to which an action-reaction dynamic singly
and inexorably drove how governments competed militarily. He
explained:

To build a national defense is to recognize serious differ-
ences, potentially incompatible goals of possible adver-
saries. Military forces then are at least partially competi-
tive: What one side does, whether to defend itself or to
initiate attack or to threaten attack or response, may be
at the partial expense of another side. (Weapons are not
by nature altogether friendly.) This means in turn that
some connection is only to be expected between what one
side does and the kind and probable size of a potential
opponent's force.

Arms race doctrines plainly want to say much more than
these simple truths. They suggest that the competition
results from exaggerated fears and estimates of oppos-
ing threats, and therefore is not merely, or even mainly.

instrumental to the partially opposed objectives of each
side. The competition takes on an explosive life of its
own that may frustrate the objectives of both. Explosive
in two senses: (a) it leads to "accelerating" (or "exponen-
tial" or "spiraling" or "uncontrolled" or "unlimited" or
"unbridled" or "infinite") increases in budgets and force
sizes; (b) it leads inevitably to war, or at any rate makes
war much more likely. ^^*

Having attempted to make clearer the conceptual confusions
surrounding spiraling arms racing, Wohlstetter and colleagues
sought to see whether the history of the U.S.-USSR strategic nuclear
competition up to that point in time actually had resembled such
an arms race. Their study proceeded in three main parts.

First, they reviewed available American intelligence forecasts
to evaluate the extent to which, in fact, the United States had
regularly overestimated Soviet strategic nuclear deployments with
"worst-case" analyses, as arms race proponents had frequently
charged. To begin with, they noted that while U.S. intelligence
had overestimated the rapidity with which the USSR would
deploy long-range ICBMs in the late 1950s, it had underestimated,
at the same time, the number of deployed Soviet intermediate
range and medium range ballistic missile (IR/MRBMs) launchers.
Moreover, after carefully examining annual intelligence
predictions and estimates submitted by the Secretary of Defense
to the Congress between 1962 to 1972, Wohlstetter and company
arrived at surprising and counterintuitive findings. Within this
population of before-the-fact intelligence predictions and after-
the-fact observed estimates of Soviet nuclear deployments, the
U.S. had wnderestimated repeatedly and systematically over a
10-year period how much the USSR would annually add to its
strategic nuclear forces. ^^'

Second, the Wohlstetter team looked carefully at the history
of budgets for U.S. strategic nuclear forces to determine the rate
at which spending on these forces had increased. Again, they
arrived at startling and counterintuitive findings. U.S. annual
spending on strategic offensive forces, in fact, had decreased from
the mid-1950s until the early 1970s. In particular, spending in the
1950s was more than four times spending in 1976 in terms of
constant dollars, and the budget for U.S. strategic nuclear forces
had declined in an almost exponential manner since 1961.^^"

Third, Wohlstetter and colleagues examined whether
qualitative improvements had actually led to more indiscriminate
and destabilizing forces. They found that, even though both the
United States and Soviets had pursued technological innovations
during the 1960s, American trends pointed decidedly downward,
not only for spending on U.S. strategic nuclear forces, but also
for key qualitative indicators — for example, the stockpile's total
explosive energy yield, the number of strategic offense and
defense warheads, and the arsenal's equivalent megatonnage.^^^

Taken together, these findings sharply contradicted the
sort of invariable enemy overestimation and worst-casing, the
unchecked growth in strategic nuclear arms and spending,
and the ever-increasing arsenal destructiveness that arms race
theorists had claimed was occurring on the U.S. side. This led the
Wohlstetter team to caution that arms racing did not provide an
insightful model of how the U.S. and USSR actually had competed
strategically in the nuclear age. Arms racing was, at best, an
emotionally-charged but muddled and inaccurate metaphor.

What disturbed the Wohlstetters perhaps most of all,
however, was how many arms control proponents had used
(and were still using) the concept of arms racing to advocate for a
U.S. nuclear posture based on doctrines of automatic deterrence,
minimum deterrence, or the then-emerging doctrine of mutual
assured destruction (MAD): that is, for a nuclear posture which,
in essence, would assure, in the event of any attack by nuclear-
armed adversaries, that the United States would escalate to
massive nuclear retaliation against cities and civilian populations.
The underlying hope of many such arms control proponents
was that if the United States and USSR kept numerically small,
technologically crude, and explosively indiscriminate nuclear
arsenals aimed only at civilian noncombatants, the sheer horror
of this posture would not only make all forms of nuclear war
less probable, but also make movement toward total nuclear
disarmament — and perhaps toward the dissolution of national
sovereignty, world government, and perpetual peace — more
likely.

In contrast, Albert and Roberta fiercely opposed such
"countervalue" doctrines of nuclear deterrence that targeted
cities and civilian noncombatants instead of military forces.
Although they deeply doubted the likelihood and verifiability of
total nuclear disarmament, they saw themselves as sharing the
arms controllers' goal of making nuclear war less likely. But they
maintained that the arms control establishment's preferred nuclear

posture — a "minimum deterrent" posture which priviledged a
sort of indiscriminate destructiveness against civilians that U.S.
decisionmakers might not be willing to carry out, even in the most
extreme of circumstances — was unstable, immoral, and unlikely
to deter plausible forms of aggression. In his article, "Racing
Forward? Or Ambling Back?" (1976), Albert elaborated on this
point:

Perverse current dogmas center most of all on an at-
tempt to stop or slow technologies of discrimination and
control. However, the remarkable improvements in ac-
curacy and control in prospect will permit non-nuclear
weapons to replace nuclear ones in a wide range of con-
tingencies. Moreover, such improvements will permit
new forms of mobility for strategic forces, making it
easier for deterrent forces to survive. More important,
they will also increase the range of choice to include
more discriminate, less brutal, less suicidal responses to
attack — responses that are more believable. And only a
politically believable response will deter. ^^^

In other words, the Wohlstetters held that credible deterrence
need not rely on a choice between indiscriminate, massively
destructive, and therefore implausible forms of nuclear retaliation,
or no response at all. Rather, a principal aim of responsible
nuclear-age strategic competition should be to increase the range
of credible (and especially non-nuclear) responses available to
decisionmakers, especially against limited-nuclear and less-than-
nuclear aggression, and by so doing actually strengthen U.S.
deterrence. Albert explained:

Some technologies reduce the range of political choice;
some increase it. If our concern about technology getting
beyond political control is genuine rather than rhetori-
cal, then we should actively encourage the development
of techniques that increase the possibilities of political
control. There will be a continuing need for the exercise
of thought to make strategic forces secure and discrimi-
natingly responsive to our aims, and to do this as eco-
nomically as we can."^

Although the Wohlstetters were skeptical of many of the arms
controllers' canonical dogmas, this did not mean that they saw

arms control agreements as having no utility. Rather, they viewed
such agreements as being useful within clear limits. "Agreements
with adversaries can play a useful role, but they cannot replace
national choice," Albert pointed out in "Racing Forward? Or
Ambling Back?" But he added: "Neither the agreements nor
the national choices are aided by the sort of hysteria implicit in
theories of a strategic race always on the point of exploding.""*

In the early 1980s, Albert and Roberta would draft an essay
titled "On Arms Control: What We Should Look for in an Arms
Agreement" which provides insight into what they viewed
to be — and not to be — viable approaches for arms control
agreements. (This previously unpublished essay is included in
the present volume.) And in the mid-1980s, Albert and his Pan
Heuristics colleague, Brian Chow, would coauthor a detailed
technical proposal for an arms control agreement to establish self-
defense zones in space. "^ (This volume also includes a condensed
summary of this proposed agreement as published in the Wall
Street Journal.)

The Study's Aftermath.

The Wohlstetters' study on the nature of the U.S. -USSR
strategic competition exerted influence and elicited controversy
in the mid-to-late 1970s. Most notably, their study would form
part of the larger context for the so-called "Team B" experiment
in competitive intelligence analysis. First suggested by members
of the Ford Administration's Presidential Foreign Intelligence
Advisory Board (PFIAB) in August 1975, this experiment was
officially begun by Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) George
H. W. Bush and President Ford's National Security Advisor Brent
Scowcroft in June 1976.

A now-declassified December 1976 memorandum provides a
summary of the "Team B" exercise from the White House's point
of view."* The experiment would begin with two groups, an
"A" team composed of members of the Intelligence Community
that would prepare "the 1976 estimate of Soviet forces for
intercontinental attack ... in accordance with established
Community practices," and a "B" team composed of "experts
inside or outside of government" that would prepare an alternate
assessment."^ Both teams would be provided with the same
body of intelligence information, and each would work to arrive
at independent conclusions about three specific topics: namely.

"[1] Soviet ICBM accuracy, [2] Soviet low altitude air defense
capability, and [3] Soviet strategic policy objectives. "^^* Both
teams would have access to each other's final products and be
allowed to write comments on each other's assessments. Finally,
the National Security Advisor, in consultation with the DCI and
PFIAB, would review and critique the highly classified results.

In December 1976, Team B completed its Top Secret final
report. Intelligence Community Experiment in Competitive Analysis:
Soviet Strategic Objectives: An Alternative View™ Two months
earlier, however, information about the exercise had already
been leaked to the Boston Globe and Washington Star. The resulting
news stories had set off a politicized firestorm within Washington
that prevented dispassionate public discussion of the intelligence
experiment's pluses and minuses. Although the highest levels of
the Ford Administration had authorized the Team B exercise, critics
insistently viewed this experiment in competitive intelligence
analysis as nothing more than a direct assault on the Nixon and
Ford Administrations' policy of detente with the Soviet Union.

Wohlstetter had declined an invitation to join Team B.^*"
Nonetheless, a number of journalists and opinion-makers
would mistakenly assert that he had worked on the intelligence
experiment. In response to a January 4, 1977, op-ed by Joseph
Kraft in the Washington Post, Albert wrote a letter to the editor to
correct the record: "I had no part in the team that recently took
an independent look at past and present national intelligence
estimates. Nor have I seen their report."^*^

These controversies notwithstanding, Albert and Roberta's
study on arms racing helped to reframe Washington's
understanding of the U.S. -USSR strategic competition. Indeed,
key government decisionmakers would publicly refute the
"mirror-imaging" assessments of Soviet nuclear spending and
procurement that had led some arms controllers to claim that
while the USSR wanted only to field a "minimum deterrent," U.S.
actions were activating an action-reaction dynamic that was forcing
the Soviets to build more weapons and sparking an unnecessary
nuclear arms race.^*^ On that point. President Carter's Secretary
of Defense Harold Brown would famously observe before a joint
meeting of the Senate and House budget committees in 1979:
"Soviet spending has shown no response to U.S. restraint — when
we build, they build; when we cut, they build. "^*^

V. TOWARDS DISCRIMINATE DETERRENCE

In 1962, Thomas Schelling and Morton Halperin published
(with research assistance from Donald Brennan) Strategy and Arms
Control, a book that famously identified what they took to be the
three core objectives of all arms control agreements: to reduce "[1]
the likelihood of war, [2] its scope and violence if it occurs, and [3]
the political and economic costs of being prepared for it."^*^ Albert
and Roberta Wohlstetter saw themselves as sharing these very
same goals, but they diverged from the conventional wisdom of
most arms controllers in that they believed the United States (and
the USSR) could often achieve these objectives more reliably and
effectively by means of independent technological innovation.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Albert would work to demonstrate
the stabilizing potential of technological innovation. In particular,
he would join a small circle of analysts who identified for U.S.
decisionmakers new alternatives for responding to — and thus for
deterring — a wide spectrum of possible enemy aggression without
resorting to the sort of massive nuclear retaliation against cities
and civilian populations prescribed by MAD and other doctrines
of automatic and minimum deterrence. By promoting the
development of technologies and systems that stressed precision,
control, and information, Wohlstetter would help the United
States to reject MAD-inspired threats against noncombatants,
and instead to field a new generation of more discriminate and
less destructive non-nuclear capabilities that, in turn, would
substantially reduce America's reliance on nuclear weapons.

Birth of MAD: A New Doctrine of Deterrence by Massive
Retaliation.

The doctrine of mutual assured destruction first emerged in
the late 1960s. Like earlier doctrines of automatic and minimum
deterrence, MAD held that a government could deter stably and
reliably a wide range of nuclear and non-nuclear aggression
simply by threatening to escalate any conflict with massive
retaliatory attacks targeting the aggressor's cities and populations.
Because MAD required a government to field only a "minimum
deterrent" second-strike capability consisting of technologically
crude and indiscriminately destructive nuclear weapons
aimed at civilians, the doctrine counseled against technological

innovation. The reason was that when two governments adopted
"minimum deterrent" nuclear postures, MAD doctrine holds that
the necessary outcome will be a stable, mutual deterrence. Arms
controllers — especially arms race theorists who sought to limit
qualitative technological improvements to America's strategic
nuclear forces — thus gravitated toward MAD.

In a curious twist, however, it was Donald Brennan, an arms
controller at Herman Kahn's Hudson Institute, who first coined
the phrase "mutual assured destruction" in the mid-to-late 1960s.
Brennan meant MAD as a tongue-in-cheek way of mocking arms
controllers who had advocated escalatory threats of massive
nuclear retaliation as a means not only of deterring a wide range
of nuclear and non-nuclear aggression, but also of achieving deep
cuts in nuclear arms. Nonetheless, many such arms controllers
ended up embracing the phrase and the concept.

MAD alludes to a concept that was birthed during Secretary
of Defense Robert McNamara's tenure. Upon arriving at the
Pentagon, Secretary McNamara and his team of analysts — a group
which included Charles Hitch, William W. Kaufmann, Alain
Enthoven and other alumni of the RAND Corporation— set out
to rein in what they saw as the budgetary excesses of the military
services. To constrain military spending on nuclear weapons and
delivery vehicles, they had introduced by late 1963 the metric
of assured destruction capability. (Although assured destruction
capability is traditionally referred to by the acronym AD, this
essay shall refer to it as ADCAP.) Enthoven, a protege of Albert
Wohlstetter who had served initially as McNamara's Deputy
Assistant Secretary of Defense for Systems Analysis, explained
the concept behind ADCAP in a 1977 essay:

[T]he size and composition of our strategic retaliatory
forces would be determined by the "assured destruction
mission." Under this policy, we would buy amounts
and kinds of forces sufficient to be sure, even under very
pessimistic assumptions, that they could survive a de-
liberate Soviet attack [aimed directly against them] well
enough to strike back and destroy 20 to 25 percent of
their population.^*^

With the ADCAP metric, the McNamara Pentagon had sought
to provide an argument for limiting the procurement of second-
strike nuclear forces among the military services. However,
ADCAP was not meant to imply that, in time of war, the United

States would actually target the Soviet civilian population with
massive nuclear retaliation. In How Much is Enough? (1971),
Enthoven and K. Wayne Smith underscored this point:

The assured destruction test did not, of course, indicate
how these forces would actually be used in a nuclear
war. United States strategic offensive forces have been
designed with the additional system characteristics —
accuracy, endurance, and good command and control —
needed to perform missions other than assured destruc-
tion, such as limited and controlled retaliation.^*'

Indeed, when President Kennedy entered into office in 1961,
his Administration sought to break away from the Eisenhower
Administration's "New Look," a declaratory nuclear policy that
sought to deter a broad range of Soviet aggression (including
even minor provocations in Western Europe) through threats
to escalate any conflict to higher levels of violence with massive
nuclear retaliation. Instead, the Kennedy Administration decided
to stress a more proportional "flexible response" approach to
defense, to that end renouncing "countervalue" or "countercity"
targeting of civilians with nuclear weapons. During his 1962 State
of the Union address, for instance. President Kennedy declared:

. . . our strength may be tested at many levels. We intend
to have at all times the capacity to resist non-nuclear or
limited attacks — as a complement to our nuclear capac-
ity, not as a substitute. We have rejected any all-or-noth-
ing posture which would leave no choice but inglorious
retreat or unlimited retaliation.^*^

Moreover, at a commencement speech before the University of
Michigan on July 9, 1962, Secretary McNamara delivered his
famous "Ann Arbor speech" in which he made public the U.S.
Government's explicit renunciation of countervalue targeting:

The U.S. has come to the conclusion that to the extent
feasible, basic military strategy in a possible general nu-
clear war should be approached in much the same way
that more conventional military operations have been
regarded in the past. That is to say, principal military
objectives, in the event of a nuclear war stemming from
a major attack on the Alliance, should be the destruction
of military forces, not of his civilian population.^**

In the mid-to-late 1960s, however, McNamara began issuing
statements that consciously but less-than-accurately conflated
assured destruction capability with U.S. targeting policy. Such
conflation encouraged advocates of automatic/ minimum
deterrence to construe AD CAP to be not merely a metric to cap
the size and composition of the U.S. nuclear arsenal, but also to
constitute actual declaratory policy regarding whom — namely,
civilian noncombatants — the United States would target nuclear
forces. Arms controller Donald Brennan referred to holders of
such views as "MADvocates," and Wohlstetter would join him
in denouncing their preferred MAD-inspired threats of massive
nuclear retaliation as disproportionate, out of control, and not
credible. Moreover, Albert's own work on promoting technologies
of precision, control, and information would later help to create
non-MAD response options to a broad range of potential nuclear
and non-nuclear military provocations.

The Long Range Research and Development Planning
Program.^*'

In the early-to-mid 1970s, Wohlstetter participated in a highly
classified DoD study that would help to clarify the potentially
revolutionary implications that new technologies could have
for war and peace in the nuclear age. This study would not only
help the United States over time to reject doctrines of automatic
and minimum deterrence and MAD-inspired threats of massive
nuclear retaliation, but also lay the seeds for America's own
"revolution in military affairs."

Initiated by Stephen J. Lukasik, director of the Pentagon's
Advanced Research and Projects Agency (ARPA), and Fred
Wikner, an informal representative of the Defense Nuclear Agency
(DNA), this study was known as the Long Range Research and
Development Planning Program or LRRDPP. Because Lukasik
and Wikner had intended to keep the study initially low-key, they
consciously chose a name for the study that would be clunky, and
the acronym for which would not be easy to pronounce.

The LRRDPP sought to examine military applications for
emerging technologies: for example, new methods of autonomous-
terminal homing to deliver munitions more precisely, planned
global positioning system satellites, and anticipated improvements
in micro-computing and information-processing. The goal
was to lay out how America's military services could leverage

these technologies to provide U.S. decisionmakers with new
alternatives — that is, choices that would not rely on indiscriminate
massive nuclear retaliation— for responding to limited-nuclear
and less-than-nuclear aggression.

To work on the study, Lukasik and Wikner brought together
technologically innovative industrial contractors with Albert
Wohlstetter, Joseph Braddock, Don Hicks, Dom Paolucci, Jack
Rosengren, and other analysts who had strong knowledge of the
subject of nuclear-age strategy and intimate familiarity with the
military services. Lukasik — in the commentary that he contributes
to the present edited volume — summarizes how the LRRDPP
worked and some of Wohlstetter' s contributions:

The program was organized into three panels supported
by four industrial contractors to contribute expertise and
advanced concepts in ground, air, and naval warfare,
conventional and nuclear munitions, reconnaissance,
command and control, and system integration. Albert
chaired the strategic alternatives panel, Don Hicks the
advanced technology panel, and Jack Rosengren the
munitions panel. Senior-level executives from OSD
[Office of the Secretary of Defense] and the Services
participated in panel sessions. The team members were
selected for their in-depth knowledge as well as their
skill in working as a multidisciplinary group, combining
history, strategy, technology, military operations, and
systems. In addition to Albert's broad skills, his ability
to synthesize the essence of a problem and its solution
and to communicate it to senior executives and political
leaders was invaluable.

A number of factors motivated the LRRDPP. For one, both
Wikner (who had served as General Creighton Abrams's scientific
advisor at Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, and helped to
push into the field very early forms of precision-guided munitions)
and Lukasik believed that future technological innovations
could change the nature of strategy and warfare — just as the
advent of nuclear weapons had. For another, contemporaneous
Soviet writings on the concept of revolutions in military affairs
(RMAs) — in particular. Colonel General Nikolai Andreevich
Lomov's 1972 edited volume Scientific-Technical Progress and the
Revolution in Military Affairs (A Soviet Viewy^° — had encouraged
high-level strategic thinkers within the U.S. Government to

challenge conventional thinking on the transformative potential
of military innovation.

In addition, the LRRDPP's summary report of February
1975 would cite two additional crucial developments. The
strategic nuclear forces of both the United States and the USSR
had apparently acquired survivable, controllable, and therefore
credible second-strike capability; and in part because of this, the
Executive Branch had called for a reassessment of the World War
Il-era "strategic bombing" metrics that were still being used to
measure the effectiveness of nuclear and conventional strategic
attacks — namely, "the number of targets destroyed" and "the
percentage of the targets at risk that have been destroyed by the
attack." 151

Citing the potential feasibility of "weapons with near zero
miss distance," theLRRDPP strategists proposed what Wohlstetter
had termed the dual-criterion (or, alternatively, the dual-criteria)
to replace the persisting World War Il-era targeting metrics.
Under the dual-criterion, the U.S. military would aim: "(1) to
achieve the desired damage expectancy on an intended target or
target system with high confidence, while simultaneously (2) not
damaging particular regions or population areas, again with high
confidence. "15^ To meet the dual -criterion's much more stringent
targeting requirements, the strategists identified promising
weapon system concepts which, by capitalizing on foreseeable
improvements in the accuracy of warhead delivery and other
technologies, could accomplish their missions using extremely
low -yield nuclear and even non-nuclear explosives. Such weapon-
system concepts included remotely-piloted vehicles, precision-
delivered ballistic missiles, deep-earth penetrators, shallow-
earth penetrators, and advanced precision-guided munitions. ^^^
Improvements in a warhead's delivery accuracy can make greater
reliance on non-nuclear explosives possible. When it comes to
increasing the probability of destroying a hardened point target
(e.g., a missile silo), a ten-fold improvement in the accuracy of a
warhead's delivery vehicle is roughly equivalent to a thousand-
fold increase in the warhead's indiscriminate explosive yield.
This, in part, is why Wohlstetter saw revolutions in precision,
control and information as potentially trumping the so-called
nuclear revolution.

The LRRDPP strategists then used a number of possible
conflict scenarios — contingencies like less-than-nuclear Soviet
aggression against non-NATO nations peripheral to the USSR,
and Soviet attacks against individual NATO member states — to

think through the sort of strategic contexts and operations in which
the United States might use these technologically-driven military
capabilities to deter and, if necessary, halt such aggression. In
particular, they identified two strategies for employing these
capabilities:

• Coercive response. A "declaratory or implied policy which
threatened attack against limited numbers of selected
targets in the USSR," the objective of which "would
be to help initiate negotiations or to support ongoing
negotiations involved with halting the war"; and

• Stemming the aggression. A deterrent response policy which
would use the military forces of "the threatened country,
along with prompt assistance by U.S. forces, [for] actually
halting the aggression. "^^^

To be sure, the LRRDPP strategists were aware of the positive
and potentially negative implications of more precise, less
destructive military capabilities. The summary report acknow-
ledges that such capabilities could raise potential "politico-military
issues," such as crisis stability, military escalation and the nuclear
threshold, and the possibility of heightened arms competition. ^^^
The strategists cautioned: "The capability to destroy military
targets with little collateral damage could be of high utility under
some circumstances; but always, there is the other side of the coin,
that the very existence of the capability may make conflict more
probable. "^^^

Yet the LRRDPP strategists also saw the opportunities
that military capabilities using non-nuclear technologies of
discrimination, control, and information could afford by enabling
America to rely substantially less on threats of massive nuclear
retaliation, to respond decisively to provocations short of all-out
nuclear war, and, by so doing, to deter such aggression all the
more credibly.

Revolutions in Technologies of Precision, Control, and
Information.

The LRRDPP study profoundly influenced Wohlstetter's
thinking. Long opposed to automatic deterrence, minimum
deterrence, and other doctrines of massive nuclear retaliation, he
had sought as early as the late 1950s to identify for decisionmakers
new alternatives to meet limited-nuclear and less-than-nuclear
forms of aggression. ^'^ Indeed, in a conference speech titled

Strength, Interest, and New Technologies delivered in September
1967 and sponsored by the Institute for Strategic Studies (now
the International Institute for Strategic Studies), he had displayed
remarkable prescience regarding the transformative potential of
emerging technologies, suggesting that revolutions in precision,
control, and information could very well trump the nuclear
revolution and the fatalism that had flowed from it.^'* America's
technological means had not yet caught up with Wohlstetter's
strategic ends, however. ^^' The Long Range Research and
Development Planning Program would help to change that.

The education and expertise gained from Lukasik and Wik-
ner's LRRDPP study would considerably inform Wohlstetter's
own heated criticisms of MAD-inspired nuclear deterrence and
targeting doctrines.^*" The LRRDPP experience would also shape
the later work of President Reagan's Commission on Integrated
Long-Term Strategy, a high-level panel that outgoing Under-
secretary of Defense for Policy Fred C. Ikle and Wohlstetter chaired
in the mid-to-late 1980s. (The other members of the Commission
were Anne L. Armstrong, Zbigniew Brzezinski, William P. Clark,
W. Graham Claytor, Jr., Andrew J. Goodpaster, James L. Holloway
III, Samuel P. Huntington, Henry A. Kissinger, Joshua Lederberg,
Bernard A. Schriever, and John W. Vessey.) With its final report,
the Commission offered a new doctrine of discriminate deterrence
to meet the future security environment's changing dangers, with
the aim of increasing American and allied ability "to bring force
to bear effectively, with discrimination and in time, to thwart
any of a wide range of plausible aggressions against their major
common interest — and in that way to deter such aggression."^*^

In the decades following the LRRDPP, the United States
developed and acquired, though in stops and starts, many of
the technologically-driven military capabilities that the study's
strategists had identified. ^'^ In turn, these non-nuclear technologies
of precision, control, and information— the development of
which many arms controllers had fiercely opposed in the 1970s
and 1980s on the grounds that they would spark spiraling
arms races— would substantially reduce America's reliance on
indiscriminately destructive nuclear weapons, and thereby help
to make all-out nuclear war less likely.

VI. LIMITING AND MANAGING NEW RISKS

In the late 1980s, especially after the fall of the Berlin Wall,
the dramatic Soviet decline was leading some to foresee a pacific
post-Cold War world. However, Albert Wohlstetter, now a Medal

of Freedom-winning strategists*^ in his mid-70s, was already
thinking about the next set of strategic challenges. "Does [the Cold
War's potential end] mean there are no latent long term dangers
demanding prudence?" he asked himself in the conclusion of a
June 1989 outline for his memoir. "[T]he political and economic
futures of the heavily armed Communist states and of the
increasingly lethally armed Third World countries are, to say the
least, rather cloudy," he observed apprehensively, adding:

Even if, implausibly, the Second and Third Worlds
change rapidly to the market economies of the First
World, nice though this would be, we are likely to dis-
cover once again that, contrary to Cobden and the Man-
chester School, trade and investment — good things
though they are — are not all that pacifying. Trading part-
ners have found a good many reasons to go to war. We
haven't seen the end of fanaticism, mortal national and
racial rivalries, and expansionist ambitions. It is conceiv-
able that all the variously sized lions and lambs will lie
down together, that there will be the kind of moral revo-
lution that many hoped for at the end of World War II
when they thought it, in any case, the only alternative to
nuclear destruction. But, as Jacob Viner [a University of
Chicago economist] wrote at the time, "It is a long, long
time between moral revolutions." We should not count
on it.«*

In the years following, Wohlstetter's apprehensions would prove
well-founded as the end of the Cold War — a global competitive
order that his work in strategy had helped in some ways to sustain
and in other ways to end — gave way to growing international
disorder.

Seventeen months before the USSR's December 1991 dis-
solution ended the Cold War, Saddam Hussein's Ba'athist Iraqi
military invaded Kuwait — producing a Persian Gulf conflict
contingency that Wohlstetter and his colleagues had presciently
warned of as early as 1980. ^^"^ In the early 1990s, Slobodan
Milosevic's pan-Serbian ambitions ignited long-suppressed ethnic
rivalries, and then genocide, in the Balkans. In the mid-1990s,
deep racial rivalries would also lead to genocide in Rwanda.
And in the late 1990s, after Osama bin Laden had issued a fatwa
urging attacks on American citizens, his Al Qaeda organization
carried out deadly bombings against U.S. embassies in Kenya and

Tanzania — in retrospect, harbingers of the violent extremism and
suicidal fanaticism that were yet to come.

Moreover, the United States would discover just how lethally
armed the former Third World and the Communist holdouts
were becoming. In the aftermath of the Gulf War, the American-
led coalition uncovered a Ba'athist Iraqi nuclear program far
closer to producing a nuclear weapon than either the Western
intelligence services or the International Atomic Energy Agency
(IAEA) had ever anticipated. And at mid-decade, after North
Korea had refused to grant the IAEA access to suspected nuclear
weapons-relevant facilities, Washington began long negotiations
with Pyongyang for an "Agreed Framework," a "grand bargain"
that sought to prevent the North Koreans from acquiring fissile
material for a nuclear explosive device.

Wohlstetter remained intellectually active during the
post-Cold War period until his death in 1997. As a member of
the Defense Policy Board, he supported U.S. efforts to liberate
Kuwait from Ba'athist Iraq during the Gulf War. After the war,
he lambasted Presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton
for what he saw as their failures to respond meaningfully to
Ba'athist aggression against Iraqi Shi'a and Kurdish popula-
tions, as well as to Saddam's other violations of the United Na-
tions Security Council resolutions that had established the strin-
gent conditions for the Gulf War's cessation.^**

In the mid-1990s, Albert, now an octogenarian, focused much
of his attention on the Balkans, publishing numerous op-eds
(especially on the opinion page of the Wall Street Journal, edited
by his long-time friend and colleague. Bob Bartley) and articles
that sharply rebuked Western leaders for their indifference
and indecisiveness towards Slobodan Milosevic's pan-Serbian
expansionism, and agitated for greater Western involvement
on behalf of Bosnian Muslims and other victims of Milosevic's
aggression. ^''^ Of note, he and former British Prime Minister
Margaret Thatcher coauthored "What the West Must Do in
Bosnia/' an open letter to President Clinton published in the Wall
Street Journal in September 1993, and signed by more than 100
people from across the globe and the political spectrum — people
like Morton Abramowitz, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Osama El Baz,
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Zuhair Humadi, Marshal Freeman Harris,
Pierre Hassner, Zalmay Khalilzad, Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan,
Teddy Kollek, Laith Kubba, Czeslaw Milosz, Paul Nitze, Richard
Perle, Karl Popper, Eugene Rostow, Henry Rowen, George
Shultz, George Soros, Susan Sontag, Elie Wiesel, Leon Wieseltier,

and Paul Wolfowitz.^''^ (The text of this letter is reprinted in this
volume.)

And in response to what he considered to be the shortcomings
of the Agreed Framework between the United States and North
Korea, Wohlstetter called on Washington to admit that the global
spread of nuclear fuel-making is significantly driving the problem
of proliferation and to face "squarely the challenge of persuading
our major allies, not to say our potential adversaries [such as
Pyongyang], to abandon the sale or use of plutonium fuel" and
other weapons-usable nuclear materials.^*'

Although Albert Wohlstetter died in Los Angeles on January
13, 1997, and Roberta, in New York City on January 6, 2007, their
work in strategy remains all too relevant and timely.

In the early years of the 21st century, the United States and its
allies are now struggling with many of the problems of nuclear-
age policy that the Wohlstetters themselves had anticipated
and grappled with throughout their long careers in strategy —
problems like the dangers posed by the spread of nuclear bombs,
fuel-making technologies, and fissile materials to new states
and nonstate actors; the difficulties of enforcing ambiguously
interpreted international law and nuclear nonproliferation
rules; the uncertain economics surrounding energy security
and alternatives for power production; and the proper role of
deterrence and military force in an increasingly lethally-armed
and disorderly world. Their writings on nuclear-age strategy and
policy thus can help decisionmakers and policy analysts (as well
as those who aspire to these positions) to clarify their thinking on
these most urgent matters.

When Albert spoke of his approach to the analysis and
design of strategic policy, he often liked to describe it as "coming
down at right angles to an orthodoxy. "^^^ Indeed, Wohlstetter's
approach did not fit well the conventional dichotomy of hawk
and dove. He was a strategist who had originally established his
reputation for his path-breaking work on nuclear deterrence, a
traditionally hawkish concept; yet he had added to that reputation
not only by supporting nuclear nonproliferation, an often dovish
concern, but also by consistently urging the U.S. Government to
block the spread of nuclear weapons, weapons-relevant nuclear
technologies, and weapons-usable nuclear material to America's
allies and adversaries alike. He was a strategist who, like the doves,
was horrified by the brute destructiveness of nuclear weapons

and nuclear war, yet hawkishly saw U.S. innovation in military
technologies of precision, control, and information as a way of
markedly limiting the potential of weapons for indiscriminate
killing, thereby strengthening deterrence and making nuclear war
less likely in the first place.

Indeed, when President Reagan awarded Medals of Freedom
to the Wohlstetters in November 1985, he summarized their work
in the following way:

Albert has always argued that in the nuclear age tech-
nological advances can, if properly understood and ap-
plied, make things better; but his point, and Roberta's,
has been a deeper one than that. He has shown us that
we have to create choices and, then, exercise them. The
Wohlstetters have created choices for our society where
others saw none. They've taught us that there is an es-
cape from fatalism. ^^^

In the 21st century, the writings of Albert and Roberta
Wohlstetter on strategy can challenge today's and tomorrow's
decisionmakers to "escape from fatalism," and come "down at
right angles" to stagnant orthodoxies; to move beyond the sort
of partisan dichotomies that have come to dominate and even
cloud thinking on limiting and managing nuclear risks and to
search for, discover, and even invent new policy choices that help
America to avoid the nuclear age's worst dangers, and in Albert's
own words, "slowly and piecemeal, [to] build a more orderly and
safer world. "^^^

To these ends, this edited volume provides readers not
only with the present essay on the Wohlstetters' key historical
contributions, but also with many of Albert and Roberta's most
enduring and relevant writings, some of which have never before
been published. This volume's six chapters correlate directly
with the six themes set forth in the present introductory essay —
namely, (1) Analysis and Design of Strategic Policy, (2) Nuclear
Deterrence, (3) Nuclear Proliferation, (4) Arms Race Myths
vs. Strategic Competition's Reality, (5) Towards Discriminate
Deterrence, and (6) Limiting and Managing New Risks. (However,
the editors of this volume have remained mindful of James Digby
and J. J. Martin's wise caveat that, given Albert and Roberta's
"continuity of concepts across many diverse types of military
problems," it therefore "may be inconsistent with the nature of
[the Wohlstetters'] work to summarize their contributions in

terms of discrete categories. "^^^) Moreover, each chapter begins
with a short commentary by a former colleague or student of
Albert and Roberta — Henry S. Rowen, Alain Enthoven, Henry
Sokolski, Richard Perle, Stephen J. Lukasik, and Andrew W.
Marshall, respectively — before offering the selected Wohlstetter
writings themselves.

To conclude, at least two larger themes emerge from a close
reading and careful appreciation of the Wohlstetters' work in
strategy. First, as a palliative to the fatalism that sometimes
besets the nuclear age and gives rise to the extreme responses of
the Utopian or the Dystopian, we must learn to tolerate the fact
of uncertainty. Indeed, in the conclusion to her magisterial 1962
study of one of America's worst military disasters, Roberta soberly
observed, "If the study of Pearl Harbor has anything to offer for
the future, it is this: We have to accept the fact of uncertainty and
learn to live with it. No magic, in code or otherwise, will provide
certainty. Our plans must work without it."^^''

Second, as the United States struggles not only to limit and
manage the nuclear risks and changing dangers it faces in this
new century, but also to "slowly and piecemeal, build a more
orderly and safer world," we must weigh and consider carefully
Albert's sober words on the need for facing up to hard choices
and sustaining intelligent effort as expressed in No Highway to
High Purpose (1960):

The great issues of war and peace deserve to be treated
candidly and objectively, without wishfulness or hys-
teria. . . . [They] are tall orders. They cannot be filled
quickly, or finally, or by means of some semiautomatic
gadget, or in one heroic burst of energy. Nor will the
answer come to us in a dream. . . . Our problem is more
like staying thin after thirty — and training for some long
steep, rocky climbs. If, as we are told, America is no lon-
ger a youth, we may yet hope to exploit the advantages
of maturity: strength, endurance, judgment, responsibil-
ity, freedom from the extremes of optimism and pessi-
mism—and steadiness of purpose. ^^^

ENDNOTES - Zarate

1. Arthur Herzog, The War-Peace Establishment, New York:
Harper & Row, 1965, p. 66.

2. Albert Wohlstetter, "Technology, Prediction, and Disorder,"
Vanderbilt Law Review, Vol. 17, No. 1, December 1963, pp. 11-12.

3. Quoted in John J. Fialka's profile of Albert Wohlstetter,
"Veteran 'Lone Ranger' Strategist Packs Firepower with Cold-
Eyed Outlook on Soviet Nuclear Policy," Wall Street Journal, July
15, 1987, p. 56.

4. Michael Howard, "Brodie, Wohlstetter, and American
Nuclear Strategy," Survival, Vol. 34, No. 2, Summer 1992, p. 113.
The military historian Sir Michael Howard (b. 1922) should not be
confused with the British conservative politician Michael Howard
(b. 1941).

5. Colin S. Gray, "The Holistic Strategist," Global Affairs, Vol.
7, No. 1, Winter 1992, pp. 174-175, 172-173.

6. Although Albert did not serve in an official capacity in
the U.S. Government, he served in many instances as an adviser.
For example, he served in 1958 as deputy science adviser of the
U.S. delegation to the Surprise Attack Conference in Geneva,
Switzerland; during the Cuban Missile Crisis, he and Roberta
served on the Quarantine Committee; in 1961 as the Department of
Defense' s informal representative to the Kennedy Administration' s
Committee on U.S. Political, Economic and Military Policy in
Europe; from 1970 onward as a member of the Chief of Naval
Operations Executive Panel; from 1985 to 1992 as a member of
the Presidential Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board; and from
1986 to 1992 as a member of the Defense Policy Board. In addition,
Albert and Roberta helped to organize numerous seminars and
forums within which senior policymakers, military planners,
and strategists from the United States, Europe, and East Asia
could meet and exchange views. These included: the California
Seminar on Arms Control and Foreign Policy (also known as
California Seminar on International Security and Foreign Policy),
formed with assistance from James F. Digby; the European-
American Workshop (later the European American Institute for
Security Research or EAI), which they formed and perpetuated
with the help of Digby, Uwe Nerlich of West Germany, Pierre
Hassner of France, and many others; the Security Conference on
Asia and Pacific (SECAP), formed with the assistance of Kiichi

Saeki of Japan; and the New Alternatives Workshop, which built
upon themes first examined by the Long Range Research and
Development Planning Program (LRRDPP), which section V of
this introduction discusses.

7. Richard Rosecrance, "Albert Wohlstetter," in John Baylis
and John Garnett, eds., Makers of Nuclear Strategy, London, UK:
Pinter Publishers, 1991, p. 57.

8. Some authors and journalists have erroneously claimed
that when Ahmed Chalabi attended the University of Chicago,
he had studied under Albert Wohlstetter in the political science
department. According to University records, Chalabi, who had
pursued a doctorate in mathematics at the University of Chicago,
never took any courses from Wohlstetter. See "Letters: Department
of Corrections," The University of Chicago Magazine, Vol. 95,
No. 6, August 2003, available from magazine.uchicago.edu/0308/
issue/letters. shtml; and "Letters: Department of Corrections,"
The University of Chicago Magazine, Vol. 95, No. 6, August 2003,
available from magazine.uchicago.edu/0310/issue/letters-dept.shtml.
Indeed, Wohlstetter and Chalabi apparently did not first meet
until the early 1990s, around the time of the Persian Gulf War,
long after both had left the University of Chicago.

9. Roberta Wohlstetter, Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision,
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1962, p. 387.

10. Ibid., pp. 387-388.

11. Ibid., p. 392.

12. For example, see "This is the Tempest Long Foretold,
editorial. The Daily Telegraph, September 12, 2001, p. 19.

13. See The 9/11 Commission Report, final report of the
National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United
States, Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, July
22, 2004, esp. p. 339, available from www.gpoaccess.gov/911/index.
html. See also James Johnson and Robert Zarate, "Slow Pearl
Harbors: Some Foreign Policy Disasters are a Long Time in the
Making," The Weekly Standard, Vol. 11, No. 14, December 19,
2005, pp. 14-15, available from www.weeklystandard.com/Content/
PuUic/Articles/000/000/006/476fjivi.asp; and Zarate, "First Lady of

Intelligence: Roberta Wohlstetter, 1912-2007," The Weekly Standard,
Vol. 12, No. 18, January 22, 2007, pp. 16-17, available from ivivw.
weeklystandard.com/Content/Protected/Articles/000/000/013/171kcloi.
asp.

14. Roberta Wohlstetter, The Buddha Smiles: Absent-Minded
Peaceful Aid and the Indian Bomb, PH-78-04-370-23, final report
prepared for the U.S. Energy Research and Development
Administration in partial fulfillment of E (49-l)-3747, Los Angeles,
CA: Pan Heuristics, November 15, 1976, revised November
1977, available from www.npec-web.org/essays/19771100-RW-
BuddhaSmiles-Revised.pdf, courtesy Joan Wohlstetter. See also
Roberta Wohlstetter, India's Nuclear Energy Program and U.S.
Policies Today, final report prepared for the Defense Nuclear
Agency, in partial fulfillment of DNA-79-C-0067, Marina del Rey,
CA: Pan Heuristics, revised February 1980, courtesy Gregory S.
Jones.

15. Agreement on the Canada-India Colombo Plan Atomic Reactor
Project, New Delhi, India, April 28, 1956, available from www.nci.
org/06nci/04/Canada-India%20CIRUS%20agreement.htm; and U.S.-
India CIRUS Agreement, March 16, 1956, available from www.nci.
org/06nci/04/US-India % 20CIRUS % 20 agreement. htm.

16. It is worth observing that, prior to 2002 or 2003, no major
book on neoconservativism had identified Albert Wohlstetter
as a "neoconservative": e.g., Peter Steinfels, Neoconservatives:
The Men Who Are Changing America's Politics, New York: Simon
and Schuster, 1979; John Ehrman, The Rise of Neoconservativism:
Intellectuals and Foreign Affairs, 1945-1994, New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1995; Mark Gerson, The Neoconservative Vision:
From the Cold War to the Culture Wars, Lanham, MD: Madison
Books, 1996; and Shadia Drury, Leo Strauss and the American Right,
New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997. Nor had any major essay or
news article on neoconservativism identified Wohlstetter as a
"neoconservative": e.g., Joshua Epstein, "The New Conservatives:
Intellectuals in Retreat," Dissent, Vol. 20, No. 2, Spring 1973,
pp. 151-162; Michael Harrington, "The Welfare State and Its
Neoconservative Critics," Dissent, Vol. 20, No. 4, Fall 1973, pp.
435-454; Bernard Weinraub, "Reagan's Brain Trust: Font of Varied
Ideas," The New York Times, December 1, 1980; Bernard Weinraub,
"Neoconservatives Today, They Explain All Their Yesterdays,"

The New York Times, December 28, 1980; David Shribman,
"Neoconservatives and Reagan: Uneasy Coalition," The New York
Times, September 28, 1981; David Shribman, "Group Goes From
Exile to Influence," The New York Times, November 23, 1981; and
Brent Staples, "Undemocratic Vistas: The Sinister Vogue of Leo
Strauss," The New York Times, November 28, 1994.

17. Howard, "Brodie, Wohlstetter, and American Nuclear
Strategy," p. 108.

18. See C. L. Sulzberger, "A New Kind of Policy Adviser," The
New York Times, April 25, 1955, p. 22; "Valuable Batch of Brains:
An Odd Little Company Called RAND Plays Big Role in U.S.
Defense," Life, Vol. 46, No. 19, May 11, 1959, pp. 101-107; and Sol
Stern, "Who Thinks in a Think Tank," The New York Times, April
16, 1967, pp. 28, 110-111, 117-120.

19. Quoted by Bruce Smith, The RAND Corporation: Case Study
of a Non-Profit Research Organization, Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1966, p. 47.

20. For more on the RAND Corporation's history, see Smith,
The RAND Corporation, and Andrew May, Strategic Thought at
RAND, unpublished draft manuscript, 2003. Dr. May's manuscript
is based on his 1998 dissertation.

21. In this discussion of Albert and Roberta Wohlstetter's lives
before RAND, I draw from research and interviews that Chicago-
based independent historian James Johnson and I had conducted,
as well as from the following transcripts of interviews with Albert
Wohlstetter: James F. Digby and Joan Goldhamer, An Interview
with Albert Wohlstetter: The Development of Strategic Thinking at
RAND, 1948-1963: A Mathematical Logician's View, unpublished,
Los Angeles, CA, July 5, 1985, courtesy James F. Digby; Martin
Collins and Joseph Tatarewicz, Smithsonian Interview with Prof.
Albert Wohlstetter, unpublished, Los Angeles, CA, July 29, 1987,
final edit, September 9, 1991, courtesy Joan Wohlstetter; and
Collins, Tatarewicz, and Gustave Shubert, RAND Corporation
History: Session Four [for the Smithsonian Videohistory Program];
Interview with Bruno Augenstein, Edward Barlow, Burton Klein,
Robert Specht, Hans Speier, and Albert Wohlstetter, Santa Monica,
CA, January 27, 1989; and Allen Greb and Digby, An Interview
with Albert Wohlstetter: The Strategist Reflects on the Past and Future

of Nuclear Policies, unpublished, August 2, 1990, revised July 10,

1991, in the Wohlstetter Papers, Interviews, Box 95, Folders 5-7. In
addition, Stephen Prowse's 1991 biographical sketches of Albert
and Roberta helped with establishing the correct chronology and
dates. See Prowse, "Albert Wohlstetter: A Biographical Sketch"
and "Roberta Wohlstetter: A Biographical Sketch," in Andrew W.
Marshall, J. J. Martin, and Henry S. Rowen, eds.. On Not Confusing
Ourselves: Essays on National Security Strategy in Honor of Albert and
Roberta Wohlstetter, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991, pp. 317-
320 and 321-322.

22. Albert's three older siblings were William (1902-1967),
Helene (1906-1974), and Charles (1910-1995). Charles became a
highly successful businessman, establishing in 1961 Continental
Telephone (Contel), an independent telephone company that
would be acquired by GTE in the 1990s. See John Holusha,
"Charles Wohlstetter, 85, Founder of Contel, Dies," obituaries.
The New York Times, May 25, 1995, p. B16. Helene would end up
working at Contel, but would be tragically murdered in the mid-
1970s during a disgruntled former Contel employee's shooting
rampage. See "Obituaries," The New York Times, August 5, 1974,
p. 26.

23. See Digby and Goldhamer, An Interview with Albert
Wohlstetter: The Development of Strategic Thinking at RAND, 1948-
1963: A Mathematical Logician's View, p. 3. Albert often cited the
importance of two Peircean writings, among others: Charles S.
Peirce, "The Fixation of Belief," Popular Science Monthly, Vol. 12,
November 1877, pp. 1-15; and "How to Make Our Ideas Clear,"
Popular Science Monthly, Vol. 12, January 1878, pp. 286-302. These
writings are available in Nathan Houser and Christian J. W.
Kloesel, eds.. The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings,
Vol. 1: 1867-1893, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press,

1992, pp. 109-123, 124-141.

24. See "City College R.O.T.C. Names 81 Officers," The New
York Times, May 7, 1933, p. 22.

25. Roberta Mary Morgan Wohlstetter was born in Duluth,
MN, on August 22, 1912. She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree
from Vassar College in 1933, a Master of Arts degree in psychology
from Columbia University in 1936, and a Master of Art's degree

in literature from Radcliffe College in 1937. After marrying Albert
Wohlstetter in 1939, she taught at Barnard College in the early
1940s and at Howard University in the mid-1940s before joining
the RAND Corporation as a consultant in 1947.

26. Willard Van Orman Quine mentions the Wohlstetters
several times in his memoir. See Quine, The Time of My Life: An
Autobiography, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000, pp. 147, 184, 198,
217.

27. For more on the history of General Panel's "Packaged
House," as well as on the roles that Albert Wohlstetter and his
brother Charles played in the company, see Gilbert Herbert,

The Dream of the Factory-Made House: Walter Gropius and Konrad
Wachsmann, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984.

28. In the following discussion of Albert Wohlstetter's
methodology, I benefited greatly from many hours of discussion
on this subject with former businessman and Chicago-based
independent historian James Johnson. As an undergraduate at
the University of Chicago in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Mr.
Johnson had studied under Wohlstetter and worked for him on
projects relating to the use of the method of scientific investigation
versus the appeal to scientific authority in debates over public
policy.

29. See Albert Wohlstetter, Theory and Opposed-System Design,
D(L)-16001-1, Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, August
1967, revised January 1968, available from www.rand.org/ahout/
history/wohlstetter/DL16001.1/DL16001.1.html. This was later
published in slightly revised form as Wohlstetter, "Theory and
Opposed-System Design," Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 12,
No. 3, September 1968, pp. 302-331. See also Wohlstetter, No
Highway to High Purpose, P-2084-RC, Santa Monica, CA: RAND
Corporation, June 1960, available from www.rand.org/about/history/
wohlstetter/P2084/P2084.html, later published in slightly abridged
form as "A Purpose Hammered Out of Reflection and Choice,"
Life, Vol. 48, No. 24, June 20, 1960, pp. 115, 126-134; "Analysis
and Design of Conflict Systems," in E. S. Quade, ed.. Analysis for
Military Decisions, Chicago, IL: Rand McNally & Co., 1964, pp.
103-148, available from www.rand.org/pubs/reports/2007/R387.pdf;
and "National Decisions Concerning Defense," in J. Banbury and

J. Maitland, eds., Proceedings of the Second International Conference
on Operations Research {in Aix-En-Provence, France, 1960), London,
UK: English Universities Press, February 1961, pp. 517-522.

30. Wohlstetter, "Theory and Opposed-System Design," p.
304.

31. Ibid.

32. Wohlstetter, No Highway to High Purpose.

33. Wohlstetter, "Theory and Opposed-Systems Design," p.

312.

34. Ibid., p. 303.

35. Ibid.

36. Ibid., p. 309.

37. Ibid., p. 316.

38. On this topic, see Albert Wohlstetter, "Scientists, Seers, and
Strategy," Foreign Affairs, Vol. 41, No. 3, April 1963, pp. 466-478.
See also Wohlstetter, Scientists, Seers, and Strategy, unpublished
book-length manuscript, circa 1963, courtesy Joan Wohlstetter.

39. Wohlstetter, "Theory and Opposed-Systems Design," pp.
303-304.

40. See Albert Wohlstetter, "The Delicate Balance of Terror,"
Foreign Affairs, Vol. 37, No. 2, January 1959, pp. 211-234. For the
extended version of the essay, see Wohlstetter, The Delicate Balance
of Terror, unabridged version, P-1472, Santa Monica, CA: RAND
Corporation, November 6, 1958, revised December 1958, available
iromwww.rand.org/about/history/wohlstetter/PU72/P14:72.html.

41. Marc Trachtenberg, History and Strategy, Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1991, p. 20.

42. As Wohlstetter recalled decades later:

[W]hat attracted me to [the problem] was that there

were forces working in opposing directions. There were
some forces that would make you want to be up close,
so that you could have close access to targets, be able to
act quickly, get in many sorties, use shorter range weap-
ons and so on. And on the other hand, there were some
things that made you want to be [further] back because if
you were close to him, why, there was just a good chance
he would also be close to you, so he would be getting
in a lot of whacks. . . . But then you could see that this
meant you would need a larger aircraft or you would
have to refuel a lot of times, and so on. And it struck me
that in the abstract there was no way of resolving this.
. . . [T]here was no way of knowing how these opposing
considerations would work out in the net effect without
looking at the geography.

See Digby and Goldhamer, An Interview with Albert Wohlstetter:
The Development of Strategic Thinking at RAND, 1948-1963: A
Mathematical Logician's View, pp. 35-36.

43. For a case study of the Base Study, see E. S. Quade,
"The Selection and Use of Strategic Air Bases: A Case History,"
in Quade, ed.. Analysis for Military Decisions, pp. 24-64. See also
Memorandum from Colonel D. O. Monteith (USAF) to Colonel
Watson, A Brief Resume of RAND Report R-266, "Selection and Use
of Strategic Air Bases, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (CJCS)
reference no. 381, April 8, 1955, TOP SECRET, declassified on
November 2, 1978, DDRS No. CK3100452915.

44. Here I wish to acknowledge Fred Hoffman and Harry
Rowen, both longtime Wohlstetter colleagues, who had stressed
to me many times the importance of understanding the politico-
military historical context in which the Base Study had begun,
and the need to explain the Base and Vulnerability Studies in a
way that avoided historical anachronism.

45. See Quade, ed.. Analysis for Military Decisions, p. 24. Using
a "back-of-the-envelope" calculation, I crudely estimate that $3.5
billion in FY 1952 dollars is approximately equivalent to as much
as $28.5 billion to $30.2 billion in FY 2007 dollars.

46. Albert J. Wohlstetter, Fred S. Hoffman, Robert J. Lutz,
and Henry S. Rowen, The Selection of Strategic Air Bases, R-244-S,

special staff report, Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, March
1, 1953, TOP SECRET, declassified on July 1, 1963, available from

www.albertwohlstetter.com/writings/19530301-AW-EtAl-R244S.pdf.

47. Albert J. Wohlstetter, Fred S. Hoffman, Henry S. Rowen,
and Robert J. Lutz, The Selection and Use of Strategic Air Bases,
R-266, final report, Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, April
1954, TOP SECRET, declassified circa 1961, available from www.

rand, org/pu bs/reports/R0266/.

48. From mid-to-late 1953, the Ad Hoc Committee of the U.S.
Air Force's Air Staff evaluated the Base Study, and then presented
its favorable evaluation to the USAF's Air Force Council, which
then debated the Study in Wohlstetter's presence. In late 1953, the
Air Force Council decided to endorse key elements of the Base
Study's preferred system, and this decision was approved by Air
Force Chief of Staff General Thomas D. White and Secretary of
the Air Force Harold Talbott. See Quade, ed.. Analysis for Military
Decisions, pp. 62-63; Collins and Tatarewicz, Smithsonian Interview
with Prof. Albert Wohlstetter, pp. 15-17; and Fred Kaplan, The
Wizards of Armageddon, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983, pp.
97-110 — esp. 105-106, as well as related endnotes on p. 402, one
of which cites General Robert Burns, "Decision on AFC 22/4b:
Vulnerability of the Strategic Striking Complex," November 2,
1953, in Library of Congress, Nathan Twining Papers, Box 103, Air
Force Council Chief Staff Decisions, Vol. I, Tab 22/4b.

49. See Albert J. Wohlstetter and Fred S. Hoffman, Defending
a Strategic Force After 1960: With Notes on the Need by Both Sides for
Accurate Bomb Delivery, Particularly for the Big Bombs, D-2270, Santa
Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, February 1, 1954, available from
www.albertwohlstetter.com/writings/19540201-AW-FH-D2270.pdf
An implication of this finding, however, was that even modest
improvements to warhead delivery accuracies could enable huge
reductions in explosive yield.

50. Bernard Brodie "Implications for Military Policy," in
Brodie, ed.. The Absolute Weapons, New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace
& Co., 1946, pp. 99, 88.

51. For example, see Albert Wohlstetter, "'Lesser' Excluded
Cases," opinion. The New York Times, February 14, 1979, p. A25.

52. Albert J. Wohlstetter, Fred S. Hoffman, and Henry S. Rowen,
Protecting U.S. Power to Strike Back in the 1950s and 1960s, R-290,
staff report, Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, September 1,
1956, TOP SECRET, declassified circa 1960s, available from www.

albertwohlstetter.com/writings/19560901-AW-EtAl-R290.pdf

53. Ibid., pp. 40-41, emphasis added.

54. Ibid., p. 6.

55. Ibid., pp. 2-3.

56. Ibid., p. 5.

57. In R-290, the Wohlstetter team wrote: "We would like this
course of Soviet action [i.e., a preclusive nuclear first strike] to be
a worse alternative to almost any other they might contemplate —
including, for example, the acceptance of defeat in some limited
or peripheral war." Ibid., p. 41.

58. For the full description of R-290's recommendations, see
Wohlstetter et al., Protecting U.S. Power to Strike Back in the 1950s
and 1960s, pp. 43-94.

59. Memorandum from Colonel Jack W. Hayes (USAF), Joint
Strategic Plans Group, to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
NSC Briefing on the Vulnerability of SAC, JCS 2250, July 31, 1956,
TOP SECRET, declassified on November 16, 1978, DDRS No.
CK3100434873; and Memorandum, Program Objectives Related
to SAC Operational Capability, AFOPD-PL-SS/Col Sutterlin/
mfm/5503, November 17, 1956, TOP SECRET, declassified on
January 30, 1980, DNSA No. 01323.

60. For more on the events that led to SAC's adoption of
Fail-Safe in Spring 1958, see Albert Wohlstetter, "SAC Test 1957
of Alert Bomber Response — Only Fail-Unsafe," April 29, 1985,
Wohlstetter Papers, Notes, Box 102, Folder 6, TAB H. See also
Memorandum CSAFM-72-58 from the USAF Chief of Staff to the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, Launching of the Strategic Air Command Alert
Force, JCS 1899/398, March 10, 1958, TOP SECRET, declassified
circa 1981, DDRS No. CK3100437133; "Launching of SAC Alert
Forces ('Fail Safe')," in Memorandum, Discussion at the 361st
Meeting of the National Security Council, Thursday, April 3, 1958,

April 4, 1958, TOP SECRET, declassified on July 18, 1989, DDRS
No. CK3100278691, pp. 7-8; Note by the Secretariat of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff on Decision on Report by the Joint Strategic Plans
Committee (In Collaboration with the Joint Intelligence Committee) on
'Positive Control' Presentation to NSC, JCS 1899/402, with report
attached. May 13, 1958, TOP SECRET, declassified on July 18, 1979,
DDRS No. CK3100169750; and Benjamin Welles, "U.S. Bombers
in Spain Poised to Take to Air in 15 Minutes: Specially Trained
Crews Kept on Alert for Orders from Main Omaha Base — Each Jet
Has Assigned Target," The New York Times, September 6, 1958, p.
2.

61. See Wohlstetter, Hoffman, and Rowen, Protecting U.S.
Power to Strike Back in the 1950s and 1960s, pp. 76-77.

62. See Fred C. Ikle, Gerald J. Aronson, and Albert Madansky,

On the Risk of an Accidental or Unauthorized Nuclear Detonation,
RM-2251, Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, October 15,
1958, esp. pp. 100-101 and 154, available from www.rand.org/pubs/
research_memoranda/RM2251/.

63. Background on Baran's work on survivable and distributed
communication networks is available from rand.org/about/history/
baran.html. See also Virginia Campbell, "How RAND Invented
the Postwar World," Invention & Technology, Summer 2004,
esp. pp. 57-58, available from www.rand.org/about/history/Rand.
IT.Summer04.pdf.

64. Citations in this section refer not to the abridged Foreign
Affairs version of the article, but rather to the extended version:
Wohlstetter, The Delicate Balance of Terror, unabridged.

65. To Wohlstetter, a prototypical automatic deterrer was Nobel
prize-winning physicist Patrick Maynard Stuart Blackett, who
had written: "If it is in fact true, as most current opinion holds,
that strategic air power has abolished global war, then an urgent
problem for the West is to assess how little effort must be put into
it to keep global war abolished." See Blackett, Atomic Weapons and
East-West Relations, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,
1956, p. 32. Quoted by Wohlstetter, The Delicate Balance of Terror,
unabridged.

66. In Wohlstetter's view. General Pierre Gallois of France,
who had claimed that "a small number of bombs and a small
number of carriers suffice for a threatened power to protect
itself against atomic destruction," represented well the school
of minimum deterrence. See Gallois, "A French General Analyzes
Nuclear-Age Strategy," Realites, November 1958, p. 71. Quoted
by Wohlstetter, The Delicate Balance of Terror, unabridged. See
also 1970 Without Arms Control, Special Committee Report,
Washington, DC: National Planning Association, 1958, and P. H.
Backus, "Finite Deterrence, Controlled Retaliation," U.S. Naval
Institute Proceedings, Vol. 84, No. 3, March, 1959, both of which
advocate for an essentially "minimum deterrent" approach.

67. Wohlstetter, The Delicate Balance of Terror, unabridged.

68. Ibid.

69. During a private, high-level dinner at the Council
on Foreign Relations in New York City in 1960, Wohlstetter
elaborated further on the distinction between automatic deterrers
and minimum deterrers:

Attitudes vary towards the problem of avoiding deliber-
ate attack and towards the problem of avoiding acciden-
tal war. This variation, too, qualifies the apparently gen-
eral agreement on the importance of reducing the likeli-
hood of central war. Those who have held the theory of
the automatic balance of terror worry about the accident
problem, but not the problem of deliberate attack. Hold-
ers of the theory of minimum deterrence think it impor-
tant to deter deliberate attack, but underestimate its dif-
ficulty, because they neglect the accident problem. . . .

Quoted by William C. Staley, Jr., Rapporteur, Study Group Reports:
Strategy and Foreign Policy, First Meeting, unpublished. Council on
Foreign Relations, New York, NY, March 16, 1960, p. 14. Meeting
attendees included: James A. Perkins, Wohlstetter, Staley, Frank
Altschul, Robert Amory, Jr., Major General C. H. Bonesteel, III
(Army), Melvin Conant, Russell H. Fifield, George S. Franklin,
Jr., Caryl P. Haskins, William W. Kaufmann, Major General Glen
Martin, Oskar Morgenstern, Philip E. Mosely, Garrison Norton,
Philip W. Quigg, Dean Rusk, Joseph E. Slater, and Henry M.
Wriston.

70. Wohlstetter, The Delicate Balance of Terror, unabridged.

71. In a May 1959 internal RAND report, Albert Wohlstetter
and Henry Rowen wrote that it is important to view efforts to deter
a preclusive nuclear first strike through the "broad" concept of a
system of strategic nuclear forces composed of many elements:

[Deterrence] will require the ability to maintain under
conditions of attack a functioning system of elements,
including besides the mobile or hardened delivery ve-
hicles with the capacity to reach and penetrate the active
and passive enemy defenses, the preservation of cen-
ters of responsible decision and control, and a network
permitting a protected flow of information to and from
these decision centers. The Air Force, which pioneered
the weapons systems idea, needs to emphasize a still
broader systems concept. With the widespread multi-
plication and dispersal of weapons, positive signals are
essential to avoid war by accident or miscalculation. To
deter a deliberate attack, the system of control must be
able to survive the attack which we aim to deter. . . . [We
need] a broadened systems concept emphasizing the
ability to keep a network of elements alive and in com-
munication for the duration of the enemy's and our own
attacks — for days, not hours or minutes.

See Wohlstetter and Rowen, "Objectives of the United States
Military Posture," RM-2373, Santa Monica, CA: RAND
Corporation, May 1, 1959, available from www.rand.org/about/
history/wohlstetter/RM2373/RM2373.html.

11. For example, see Albert and Roberta Wohlstetter, Notes
on the Cuban Crisis: On the Importance of Overseas Bases in the
1960's, Offense-Defense Semantics, Keeping Open Possible Aid to
Cuban Resistance, D(L)-10647-ISA, Santa Monica, CA: RAND
Corporation, October 28, 1962, available from www.rand.org/
about/history/wohlstetter/DL10647/DL10647.html; Studies for a Post-
Communist Cuba, D(L)-11060-ISA, Santa Monica, CA: RAND
Corporation, February 25, 1963, available from www.rand.org/
about/histori//wohlstetter/DL11060/DL11060.html; On Dealing with
Castro's Cuba, Part I, D-17906-ISA, Santa Monica, CA: RAND
Corporation, January 16, 1965, available from www.rand.org/about/

74.

history/wohlstetter/D17906/D17906.html; and Controlling the Risks in
Cuba, Adelphi Papers No. 17, London, UK: Institute for Strategic
Studies, April 1965. See also Roberta Wohlstetter, "Cuba and Pearl
Harbor: Hindsight and Foresight," Foreign Affairs, Vol. 43, No. 4,
July 1965, pp. 691-707.

73. P. M.S. Blackett, Studies of War: Nuclear and Conventional,
Edinburgh, UK: Oliver and Boyd, Ltd., 1962, pp. 131, 136.

74. See Robert J. C. Butow, Tojo and the Coming of the War,
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961, p. 255. Quoted by
Rosecrance, "Albert Wohlstetter," p. 61.

75. See O'Dowd Gallagher, Action in the East, Garden City,
NY: Doubleday, 1942, p. 94. Quoted by Wohlstetter, The Delicate
Balance of Terror, unabridged, fn. 6.

76. Elsewhere in "The Delicate Balance of Terror," Wohlstetter
again elaborates:

The most important thing to say perhaps is that it doesn't
make much sense to talk about whether general war is
likely or not unless we specify a good deal else about
the range of circumstances in which the choice of sur-
prise attack might present itself. . . . Deterrence is a mat-
ter of comparative risks. How much the Soviets will risk
in surprise attack will depend in part on the vulnerabil-
ity of our future posture. . . . [T]he risks of not striking
might at some juncture appear very great to the Soviets,
involving, for example, disastrous defeat in peripheral
war, loss of key satellites with danger of revolt spread-
ing—possibly to Russia itself— or fear of an attack by
ourselves. Then, striking first, by surprise, would be the
sensible choice for them, and from their point of view
the smaller risk.

Wohlstetter, The Delicate Balance of Terror (unabridged), emphasis
added.

77. Quoted by Staley, Study Group Reports: Strategy and Foreign
Policy, p. 16, emphasis added.

78. Roberta Wohlstetter, Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision,
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1962, pp. 400-401.

79. Wohlstetter, The Delicate Balance of Terror (unabridged).

80. Albert Wohlstetter, "Some General Comments on Senator
[John F.] Kennedy's National Security Speeches," circa 1960,
Wohlstetter Papers, Writings, Box 148, Folder 10.

81. See The North Atlantic Nations: Tasks for the 1960s, a report
to the Secretary of State, August 1, 1960, SECRET, declassified on
January 9, 1986, DDRS No. CK3100227683. Known as "the Bowie
Report," the study was authored by Robert A. Bowie, who served
as Director of the Department of State's Policy Planning Staff from
1953 to 1957.

82. See A Review of North Atlantic Problems for the Future,
the Committee on U.S. Political, Economic and Military Policy
in Europe's Policy Guidance to the National Security Council,
March 1961, SECRET, declassified on December 30, 1996, DNSA
No. NH01131, esp. pp. 7-11.

83. See Comparison of "A Review of North Atlantic Problems for
the Future" with Existing National Security Council Policy, National
Security Council memorandum, March 28, 1961, SECRET,
declassified on May 20, 1994, DDRS No. CK3100055224; and Policy
Directive Regarding NATO and the AtlanticNations, National Security
[Action] Memorandum No. 40, April 24, 1961, CONFIDENTIAL,
declassified on May 4, 1977, DNSA No. BC02034.

84. Albert Wohlstetter, "Nuclear Sharing: NATO and the N+1
Country," Foreign Affairs, Vol. 39, No. 3, April 1961, pp. 355-387

85. Pierre Gallois, The Balance of Terror: Strategy for the Nuclear
Age, trans. Richard Howard, Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1961,
p. 130. Originally published as Gallois, Strategic de I'age Nucleaire,
Paris, France: Calmann-Levy, 1960.

86. Ibid., p. 109.

87. Ibid., p. 57. By the 1980s, however. General Gallois would
reverse some of his minimum deterrence views. See Gallois and
John Train, "When a Nuclear Strike is Thinkable," Wall Street
Journal, March 22, 1984, p. 30.

88. Wohlstetter, The Delicate Balance of Terror.

89. Wohlstetter, "Nuclear Sharing: NATO and the N+1
Country," p. 363.

90. Ibid., p. 385.

91. Ibid., pp. 385-386.

92. See Henry A. Kissinger, Memorandum of Conversation in
Paris on February 5, 1962, Department of State, February 9, 1962,
CONFIDENTIAL, declassified on March 2, 1997, DDRS No.
CK3100108824, p. 2.

93. For one version of the U.S. Government's history of these
negotiations, see U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency,
International Negotiations on the Treaty on the Non-proliferation of
Nuclear Weapons, Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing
Office, 1969. In 1967, as the negotiations for what would eventually
become the NPT were coming to an end, Richard T. Cooper of the
Chicago Sun-Times profiled Wohlstetter' s views on proliferation.
Wrote Cooper: "A carefully drafted treaty banning the spread of
nuclear weapons can be moderately useful for maintaining world
order, but no treaty can by itself eliminate the problem, Albert
Wohlstetter, an expert on nuclear weapons problems, cautioned."
See Cooper, "A Treaty — How Useful?" Chicago Sun-Times,
February 19, 1967, pp. 1-2.

94. Hans J. Morgenthau was a noted "realist" scholar of
international relations, and professor of political science at
the University of Chicago. Private correspondence detailing
Morgenthau' s role in helping Albert Wohlstetter to get an
appointment to the University of Chicago is available in the
Morgenthau Papers at the Library of Congress.

95. For example, see Albert Wohlstetter, Strength, Interest,
and New Technologies, opening address before The Implications
of Military Technology in the 1970s, the Institute for Strategic
Studies' ninth annual conference, Elsinore, Denmark, September
28 to October 1, 1967, D(L)-16624-PR, Santa Monica, CA: RAND
Corporation, January 24, 1968, available from www.rand.org/about/

history/wohlstetter/DL16624/DL16624.html. The address was also
published as Wohlstetter, Strength, Interest and New Technologies, in
The Implications of Military Technology in the 1970s, Adelphi Papers
No. 46, London, UK: Institute for Strategic Studies, March 1968.
See also Wohlstetter, "Perspective on Nuclear Energy," Speech
Before the University of Chicago's Twenty-Fifth Anniversary
Observance of the First Controlled Self-Sustaining Nuclear
Reaction, December 2, 1967, in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Vol.
24, No. 4, April 1968, pp. 2-5.

96. See Albert Wohlstetter et ah. Moving Toward Life in a Nuclear
Armed Crowd? ACDA Report No. PH-76-04-389-14, December
4, 1975, revised April 22, 1976. This 1975 ACDA report was
published in revised form 4 years later as Swords from Plowshares:
The Military Potential of Civilian Nuclear Energy, Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press, 1979. His coauthors were Thomas
A. Brown, Gregory S. Jones, David McGarvey, Henry S. Rowen,
Vince Taylor, and Roberta Wohlstetter.

97. Roberta Wohlstetter examined how American policies
unwittingly assisted Indian efforts to build a nuclear explosive in
The Buddha Smiles: Absent-Minded Peaceful Aid and the Indian Bomb.
For an abridged version of this report, see Roberta Wohlstetter,
"The Buddha Smiles: U.S. Peaceful Aid and the Indian Bomb,"
in Albert Wohlstetter, Victor Gilinsky et al., eds.. Nuclear Policies:
Fuel without the Bomb, Cambridge, MA: Ballinger Publishing, 1979,
pp. 57-72.

98. Wohlstetter et al.. Swords from Plowshares, pp. 24-25.

99. Ibid, p. 45.

100. Ibid, p. 15.

101. Ibid, p. 14, emphasis added.

102. Ibid., p. 127.

103. Ibid., p. 14.

104. See Albert and Roberta Wohlstetter, Gregory S. Jones, and
Henry S. Rowen, Towards a New Consensus on Nuclear Technology,
Vol. 1 of 2, report prepared for the Arms Control Disarmament

Agency infulfillment of AC7NC106, PH-78-04-832-33, Los Angeles,
CA: Pan Heuristics, July 6, 1979, available from www.npec-web.org/
Essays/19790706-TowardsANewConsensus-VolOl.pdfi and Arthur
Steiner, "Article IV and the 'Straightforward Bargain,'" PAN
Paper 78-832-08, in Wohlstetter et ah, Towards a New Consensus
on Nuclear Technology, Vol. 2: Supporting Papers, ACDA Report
No. PH-78-04-832-33, Marina del Rey, CA: Pan Heuristics, July
6, 1979, available from www.npec-web.org/Essays/19790706-Steiner-
ArticleIV-StraightforwardBargain.pdf. For a more recent analysis of
the relationship between IAEA safeguarding effectiveness and
legal interpretations of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, see
Robert Zarate, "The NPT, IAEA Safeguards, and Peaceful Nuclear
Energy: An 'Inalienable Right,' But Precisely To What?" in Henry
Sokolski, ed.. Falling Behind: International Scrutiny of the Peaceful
Atom, Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, 2008, pp. 221-290,
available from www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pubs/display.
cfm?PubID=841.

105. For example, see Albert Wohlstetter, "Spreading the
Bomb Without Quite Breaking the Rules," Foreign Policy, No. 25,
Winter 1976-1977, pp. 88-96, 145-179; Wohlstetter, Thomas Brown,
Gregory Jones, David McGarvey, Henry S. Rowen, Vincent Taylor,
and Roberta Wohlstetter, "The Military Potential of Civilian
Nuclear Energy," Minerva, Vol. 15, Nos. 3-4, Autumn- Winter 1977,
pp. 387-538; Albert Wohlstetter, Victor Gilinsky, Robert Gillette,
and Roberta Wohlstetter, eds.. Nuclear Policies: Fuel without the
Bomb, Cambridge, MA: Ballinger, 1978; Wohlstetter et ah, Nuclear
Alternatives and Proliferation Risks, DOE EN-77-C-01-2643, Los
Angeles, CA: Pan Heuristics, July 27, 1978; Wohlstetter et al,
Towards a New Consensus on Nuclear Technology; and Wohlstetter
and Henry S. Rowen, U.S. Non-Proliferation Strategy Reformulated,
Report Prepared for the National Security Council and DOE,
August 29, 1979.

106. President Gerald Ford, "Statement of the President
on Nuclear Policy," Office of the White House Press Secretary,
October 28, 1976.

107. See Henry Sokolski, "The Washington Posf Bombs Nuclear
History," The Weekly Standard, March 28, 2005, available from www.
weekly standard.eom/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/005/4:17gusvl.
asp.

108. President Jimmy Carter, "Statement of the President on
Nuclear Power Policy/' Office of the White House Press Secretary,
April 7, 1977.

109. U.S. Congress, The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Act of 1978,
Public Law 95-242.

110. Carl Walske, "Nuclear Power and Nuclear Proliferation,"
Speech Delivered to the International Conference on Nuclear
Power and the Public — A European-American Dialogue, Geneva,
Switzerland, September 27, 1977.

111 . For key hearings on the ABM before the Senate Committee
on Armed Services held on April 22 and 23, 1969, see Authorization
for Military Procurement, Research and Development, Fiscal Year 1970,
and Reserve Strength, hearings before the U.S. Senate's Committee
on Armed Services, 1st session, part 2 of 2, Washington, DC: U.S.
Government Printing Office, 1969, pp. 1109-1456a.

112. As Dr. George Rathjens stated before the Senate Armed
Services Committee:

Yet even if the Soviet SS-9 missile force were to grow
as rapidly as the Defense Department's most worrisome
projections, even if the Soviet Union were to develop
and employ MIRV's with those missiles and even if they
achieved accuracies as good as we apparently expect
with our MIRV forces (according to figures released in
late 1967 by former Deputy Secretary of Defense [Paul]
Nitze), a quarter of our MINUTEMAN force could be ex-
pected to survive a Soviet preemptive SS-9 attack. That
quarter would alone be more than enough to inflict un-
acceptable damage on the U.S.S.R.

See Rathjens, "Statement before Senate Committee on Armed
Services," excerpt April 23, 1968, in Programming-Budgeting:
Defense Analysis: Two Examples, reprint by the U.S. Senate's
Subcommittee on National Security and International Operations,
Committee on Government Operations, of testimony before the
U.S. Senate's Committee on Armed Services, Washington, DC:
U.S. Government Printing Office, September 10, 1969, p. 2.

113. Jerome Wiesner, in Wiesner, George McGovern, Donald
Brennan, and Leon Johnson, Anti-Ballistic Missile: Yes or No? New
York: Hill and Wang, 1969, pp. 13-14.

114. Quoted by Meg Greenfield, "The Ragged Non-Debate on
the ABM," opinion, Washington Post, p. A22.

115. According to ABM opponent Ralph E. Lapp, Senator
Symington had also broached the possible utility of launch-on-

Senator Stuart Symington of Missouri, a former Secre-
tary of the Air Force, raised the issue of U.S. policy in the
event that radar revealed a massive first strike aimed at
Minuteman bases. Would the Minutemen be fired before
Soviet warheads began digging into the U.S. soil? If so,
Soviet missiles would be hitting empty holes. (As Sena-
tor Fulbright pointed out, empty holes may be our most
powerful deterrent weapon.)

See Lapp, "A Biography of the ABM: From Nike to Safeguard,"
The New York Times, May 4, 1969, p. SM 129.

116. Albert Wohlstetter, "The Case for Strategic Force
Defense," in Johan Jorgen Hoist and William Schneider, Jr., eds..

Why ABM? Policy Issues in the Missile Defense Controversy, New
York: Pergamon Press, 1969, pp. 119-142.

117. See "Appendix III: Treatment of Operations-Research
Questions in the 1969 Debate," Operations Research: The Journal of
the Operations Research Society of America, Vol. 19, No. 5, September
1971, pp. 1175-1237.

118. See ibid., p. 1176. On December 22, 1969, George Rathjens,
Steven Weinberg, and Jerome Wiesner sent a letter to Thomas
Caywood, president of the Operations Research Society of
American (ORSA), questioning "both the wisdom of an inquiry
and the standing and capacity of the Operations Research Society
of America to carry it out." See "Appendix IV: Correspondence
and Comments," in ibid., pp. 1250-1251.

119. During the Senate committee hearing, Albert Wohlstetter
asserted:

The budget for strategic offense and defense forces in
fiscal 1962 was 11.3 billion dollars. The proposed fiscal
1970 budget, as of June, comes to about 8 billion dollars.
Adjusted for price changes, the 1962 figure was well over
fifty per cent higher than that for 1970, perhaps even as
much as two-thirds higher.

See Wohlstetter, "The Case for Strategic Force Defense," p. 120.

120. Ibid., p. 122.

121. Ibid., italics added.

122. Wohlstetter et ah, Protecting U.S. Power to Strike Back in the
1950s and 1960s, pp. 76-77.

123. Wohlstetter, "The Case for Strategic Force Defense," p.
123, italics added.

124. Treaty between the United States of America and the Union
of Soviet Socialist RepubUcs on the Limitation of Anti-Ballistic Missile
Systems, May 26, 1972, entered into force on October 3, 1972.

125. For example, see John W. Finney, "Safeguard ABM
System to Shut Down," The New York Times, November 25, 1975,
pp. 1 and 74.

126. Albert Wohlstetter, "Is There a Strategic Arms Race?"
Foreign Policy, No. 15, Summer 1974, p. 3. This essay was part
one in Wohlstetter' s two-part series on the strategic competition
in Foreign Policy. For part two, see Wohlstetter, "Rivals, But No
'Race'," Foreign Policy, No. 16, Fall 1974, pp. 48-81. Subsequent
reports expanded this two-part series to include the data from
which Wohlstetter made his key inferences: See Wohlstetter,
Legends of the Strategic Arms Race, USSI Report 75-1, Washington,
DC: United States Strategic Institute, September 1974, p. 5, available
from www.albertwohlstetter.com; and Wohlstetter, Thomas Brown,
Gregory Jones, David McGarvey, Robert Raab, Arthur Steiner,
Roberta Wohlstetter, and Zivia Wurtele, The Strategic Competition:
Perceptions and Response, final report for the Director of Defense

Research and Engineering (Net Technical Assessment), DAHC
15-73-C-0137, Los Angeles, CA: Pan Heuristics, January 14, 1975.
Wohlstetter's two-part essay generated considerable comment
and criticism in Foreign Policy. Comments in general agreement
included: Paul H. Nitze, "Comments," Foreign Policy, No. 16, Fall

1974, pp. 82-83; and Johan Jorgen Hoist, "What is Really Going
On?" Foreign Policy, No. 19, Summer 1975, pp. 155-163. Moderately
critical responses included: Joseph Alsop, "Comments," Foreign
Policy, No. 16, Fall 1974, pp. 83-88. Extremely critical responses
included: Morton H. Halperin and Jeremy J. Stone, "Comments,"
Foreign Policy, No. 16, Fall 1974, pp. 88-92; Paul C. Warnke, "Apes
on a Treadmill," Foreign Policy, No. 18, Spring 1975, pp. 12-29; and
Michael L. Nacht, "The Delicate Balance of Error," Foreign Policy,
No. 19, Summer 1975, pp. 163-177. Wohlstetter responded to these
comments and criticisms in "Optimal Ways to Confuse Ourselves,"
Foreign Policy, No. 20, Fall 1975, pp. 170-198. A considerably
expanded version of this essay is available as: Albert Wohlstetter,
Thomas Brown, Gregory Jones, David McGarvey, Robert Raab,
Arthur Steiner, Roberta Wohlstetter and Zivia Wurtele, Methods
That Obscure and Methods That Clarify the Strategic Competition,
DAHC 15-73-C-0074, Los Angeles, CA: Pan Heuristics, June 30,

1975, available from www.albertwohlstetter.com.

127. Wohlstetter, "Is There a Strategic Arms Race?" p. 10.

128. Ibid., p. 4.

129. Ibid., pp. 10-18.

130. Wohlstetter, "Rivals, But No 'Race'," p. 66.

131. Ibid., pp. 71-79.

132. Albert Wohlstetter, "Racing Forward? Or Ambling
Back?" Survey, Vol. 22. Nos. 3/4, Summer 1976, p. 216.

133. Ibid.

134. Ibid. In a 1987 profile of Albert Wohlstetter in the Wall
Street journal, John J. Fialka wrote:

In Mr. Wohlstetter's world, arms-control enthusiasts are
looked upon with the same deep suspicion he reserves

for generals and admirals who measure success by sim-
ply adding up megatonnage. He regards the political
hoopla surrounding arms-control talks as "a very dan-
gerous game" because it heightens people's hopes for
easy solutions. . . . The kinds of agreements that might
be enforced, he believes, are those that give each side the
freedom to innovate defenses.

See Fialka, "Veteran 'Lone Ranger' Strategist Packs Firepower
with Cold-Eyed Outlook on Soviet Nuclear Policy," p. 56.

135. Albert Wohlstetter and Brian G. Chow, "Arms Control
That Could Work," opinion. Wall Street Journal, July 17, 1985, p.
28; and Self-Defense Zones in Space, study for Integrated Long-Term
Defense Strategy in partial fulfillment of MDA903-84-C-0325,
Marina del Rey, CA: Pan Heuristics, July 1986, available from
www.alhertwohlstetter. com .

136. See Report on the Origin, Procedures, and Status of the
Experiment in Competitive Analysis on National Intelligence Issues,
memorandum. White House, December 13, 1976, SECRET,
declassified on October 17, 1996, DDRS No. CK3100092315. The
name of this memo's author has been removed.

137. Ibid., p. 2.

138. Ibid., p. 3.

139. Intelligence Community Experiment in Competitive Analysis:
Soviet Strategic Objectives An Alternative View, Report of Team "B,"
December 1976, TOP SECRET, declassified on December 16, 1992,
DNSA No. SE00501. The "B" team's leader was Dr. Richard Pipes;
its associate members were Dr. William Van Cleave, Lieutenant
General Daniel Graham, U.S. Army (Ret.), Dr. Thomas Wolfe of
the RAND Corporation, and General John Vogt, U.S. Air Force
(Ret.); advisory panel members were Amb. Foy Kohler, Paul
Nitze, Amb. Seymour Weiss, Maj. General Jasper Welch, U.S. Air
Force, and Dr. Paul Wolfowitz, then a member of the U.S. Arms
Control and Disarmament Agency.

140. See "The Book by Albert Wohlstetter," in Albert and
Roberta Wohlstetter, Proposal to the Ford Foundation, unpublished,
June 30, 1989, p. 13, courtesy of Joan Wohlstetter. Although he

began writing this memoir, he never completed it. Drafts of the
first chapter are available at the Wohlstetter Papers, housed at the
Hoover Institution's archives.

141. Albert Wohlstetter, Letter to the Editor, Washington Post,
January 15, 1977, p. A18.

142. For a critique of "mirror-imaging," see Andrew W.
Marshall, Bureaucratic Behavior and the Strategic Arms Competition,
Santa Monica, CA: Southern California Seminar on Arms Control
and Foreign Policy, 1971, esp. pp. 3-6.

143. At a Senate Appropriations Subcommittee hearing that
same year. Secretary of Defense Brown made a similar statement:
"The Soviets have really been quite single-minded. They
increased their defense expenditures as we increased ours. And
they increased their defense expenditures as we decreased ours."
See Secretary of Defense Harold Brown, testimony, January 31,
1979, in Department of Defense Appropriations for Fiscal Year 1980,
hearings before a Subcommittee on Appropriations, U.S. Senate,
96th Congress, 1st session, Washington, DC: U.S. Government
Printing Office, 1979, p. 278

144. Thomas C. Schelling and Morton H. Halperin (with
research assistance by Donald Brennan), Strategy and Arms
Control, New York: Twentieth Century Fund, 1961, p. 2. Schelling,
Halperin, and Brennan continue:

The essential feature of arms control is the recognition of
the common interest, of the possibility of reciprocation
and cooperation even between potential enemies with
respect to their military establishments. Whether the
most promising areas of arms control involve reductions
of certain kinds of military force, increases in certain
kinds of military force, qualitative changes in weaponry,
different modes of deployment, or arrangements super-
imposed on existing military systems, we prefer to treat as
an open question (emphasis added).

145. Alain C. Enthoven, "1963 Nuclear Strategy Revisited," in
Harold P. Ford and Francis X. Winters, S.J., eds.. Ethics and Nuclear
Strategy? Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1977, pp. 76-77. See also
Charles Fairbanks, "MAD and U.S. Strategy," in Henry Sokolski,

ed., Getting MAD: Nuclear Mutual Assured Destruction, Its Origins
and Practice, Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, November
2004, pp. 137-147.

146. Alain C. Enthoven and K. Wayne Smith, How Much Is
Enough? Shaping the Defense Program, 1961-1969, New York: Harper
& Row, 1971, p. 195, italics added. As Enthoven later wrote, the
assured destruction metric:

. . . was a criterion for adequacy of our deterrent; it was
not a declaration of how the forces would actually he used
in case of war. Since the amount of forces we needed to
achieve the assured destruction mission were not very
sensitive to the size of the Soviet offensive forces, this
policy appeared to put a ceiling on U.S. offensive force
requirements [emphasis in original] .

See Enthoven, "1963 Nuclear Strategy Revisited," pp. 76-77.

147. President John F. Kennedy, "State of the Union Address,"
January 11, 1962.

148. Quotedby William W. Kaufmann, The McNamara Strategy,
New York: Harper & Row, 1971, p. 116.

149. As I researched the history of the Long Range Research
and Development Planning Program, I learned a great deal from
conversations with Dr. Stephen Lukasik, the former Advanced
Research Projects Agency director who had co-initiated the study
in the early 1970s. I also gained considerable historical background
from the following paper: Andrew May and Bartlett Bulkley,
The Pre-History of the Revolution in Military Affairs, unclassified
draft report for Hicks & Associates' Strategic Assessment
Center, McLean, VA: SAIC, February 2004, available from www.
alhertwohlstetter.com/writings/SovietRMA.

150. Colonel General N. A. Lomov, ed., Scientific-Technical
Progress and the Revolution in Military Affairs (A Soviet View),
translated and published under the auspices of the U.S. Air Force,
Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1973. available
from www.alhertwohlstetter.com/writings/SovietRMA.

151. D. A. Paolucci, Summary Report of the Long Range Research
and Development Planning Program, Draft, February 7, 1975, TOP
SECRET, declassified on December 31, 1983, pp. 6-7, available
from www.albertwohlstetter.com/writings/LRRDPP. Copy of report
courtesy of Andrew May.

152. Ibid., p. 7.

153. Ibid., pp. 29-42.

154. Ibid., pp. 21-28.

155. Ibid., pp. 17-20.

156. Ibid., pp. 23-24.

157. Albert Wohlstetter and Henry S. Rowen, "Objectives of
the United States Military Posture."

158. See Wohlstetter, Strength, Interest, and New Technologies.

159. For example, see Albert Wohlstetter and Henry S.
Rowen, "Objectives of the United States Military Posture";
Wohlstetter, "Arms Debate: Letter in Response to 'The Megadeath
Intellectuals,'" New York Review of Books, Vol. 1, No. 9, December
26, 1963; and "Sin and Games in America," in Martin Shubik, ed..
Game Theory and Related Approaches to Social Behavior, New York:
John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1964, pp. 209-225.

160. For example, see Albert Wohlstetter et ah, "The Debate
on Military Policy: How Much is Enough? How Mad is MAD?"
in Fred Warner Neal and Mary Kersey Harvey, eds., Pacem in
Terris III, Vol. 2 of 4, Washington, DC: Center for the Study of
Democratic Institutions, 1974, pp. 37-43; Wohlstetter, "Threats and
Promises of Peace: Europe and America in the New Era," Orbis,
Vol. 17, No. 4, Winter 1974, pp. 1107-1144; "Varying Response
with Circumstance in Europe," in Johan Jorgen Hoist and Uwe
Nerlich, eds.. Beyond Nuclear Deterrence: New Aims, New Arms,
New York: Crane Russak, 1977, pp. 225-238; "Bishops, Statesmen,
and Other Strategists on the Bombing of Innocents," Commentary,
Vol. 75, No. 6, June 1983, pp. 15-35; "Between an Unfree World
and None: Increasing Our Choices," Foreign Affairs, Vol. 63, No. 5,
Summer 1985, pp. 962-994.

161. Discriminate Deterrence, report of the Commission
on Integrated Long-Term Strategy, Washington, DC: U.S.
Government Printing Office, January 1988, p. 64, emphasis added,
available from www.albertwohlstetter.com/writings/Disciminate
Deterrence. For a critical review, see, e.g., Paul Kennedy, "Not So
Grand Strategy," New York Review of Books, Vol. 35, No. 8. May
12, 1988, pp. 5-8. For Albert's reaction to such critical reviews,
see Wohlstetter, "Overseas Reactions to Discriminate Deterrence/'
Atlantic Community Quarterly, Vol. 26, No. 3, Fall-Winter 1988, pp.
234-269.

162. See Andrew May and Bartlett Bulkley, The Pre-History of
the Revolution in Military Affairs.

163. On November 5, 1985, President Reagan awarded the
Medal of Freedom to Albert and Roberta Wohlstetter, as well as
to Paul H. Nitze.

164. "The Book by Albert Wohlstetter," in Albert and Roberta
Wohlstetter, Proposal to the Ford Foundation, unpublished, June
30, 1989, p. 17, courtesy of Joan Wohlstetter. He began, but never
completed, this memoir. See also Wohlstetter, The Cumulative
Information Revolution and the Future Role of Discriminate Military
Forcein U.S. Sfrafegy, proposal to the Smith Richardson Foundation,
revised June 12, 1991, courtesy Joan Wohlstetter.

165. Published writings by Albert Wohlstetter on the topic of
Persian Gulf contingencies in the late 1970s and early 1980s include
Wohlstetter, "'Lesser' Excluded Cases," opinion. The New York
Times, February 14, 1979, p. A25; "Half Wars and Half Policies in
the Persian Gulf," in W. Scott Thompson, ed.. National Security in
the 1980s: From Weakness to Strength, Washington, DC: Institute of
Contemporary Studies, 1980; "Meeting the Threat in the Persian
Gulf," Survey, Vol. 25, No. 2, Spring 1980, pp. 128-188; "Les Etats-
Unis et la Securite du Golfe," Politique Etrangere, Vol. 46, No. 1,
March 1981, pp. 75-88. For unpublished writings by Albert on
Persian Gulf contingencies, some of which were commissioned
by the U.S. Government, see Wohlstetter, Interests and Power in
the Persian Gulf Vol. 1: Overview, PH-80-4-113700-42C, draft final
report prepared for the Director of Net Assessment (Office of
Secretary of Defense), the Assistant Secretary of Defense (Program
Analysis and Evaluation), and the Assistant Secretary of Defense
(International Security Affairs), in partial fulfillment of DNA 001-

78-C-0353 , Marina del Rey, CA: Pan Heuristics, March 31, 1980,
courtesy Joan Wohlstetter; Protecting Persian Gulf Oil: U.S. and
Alliance Military Policy, in Report on Persian Gulf Oil and Western
Security, Vol. Ill, Final Report prepared for the U.S. Department of
Energy, Contract No. HN-LV-79-2, PH80-11-LV7902-60C, Marina
del Rey, CA: Pan Heuristics, November 4, 1980, courtesy Gregory
S. Jones; and Interests and Power in ike Persian Gulf: Executive
Summary, draft, Marina del Rey, CA: Pan Heuristics, February
1981, courtesy Gregory S. Jones; and Interests and Power in the
Persian Gulf: An Overview, Marina del Rey, CA: Pan Heuristics,
February 1981, courtesy Gregory S. Jones.

166. See Albert Wohlstetter, "Iraq: Dictatorship Is the
Problem," opinion, Washington Post, April 24, 1991; Wohlstetter
and Fred S. Hoffman, "The Bitter End," The New Republic, Vol.
204, No. 17, April 29, 1991, pp. 20-24; Wohlstetter, "Wide Open
Secret Coup," The National Review, Vol. 44, No. 5, March 16, 1992,
pp. 34-36; "Help Iraqi Dissidents Oust Saddam," opinion. Wall
Street Journal, August 25, 1992; and "High Time," National Review,
Vol. 45, No. 3, February 15, 1993, pp. 30-33.

167. See Albert Wohlstetter, "The Balkan Quagmire: Why
We're in It — Still," opinion. Wall Street Journal, July 1, 1993, p.
A14; "The Balkan Quagmire II: The Way Out," opinion. Wall
Street Journal, July 2, 1993; "Genocide by Embargo," opinion.
Wall Street Journal, May 9, 1994, p. A14; "Arms, Not Words, for
Bosnia," opinion. Wall Street Journal, May 12, 1994, p. A14; "Notes
to Clinton on Bosnia," opinion. Wall Street Journal, June 10, 1994,
p. AlO; "Too Many Flip-Flops," opinion, Washington Post, June
26, 1994; "Embargo the Aggressors, Not the Victims," opinion.
Wall Street Journal, June 28, 1994, p. A18; "Creating a Greater
Serbia: Clinton's Final Sell-Out of Bosnia," The New Republic, Vol.
211, No. 5, August 1, 1994, pp. 22-27; "Bosnia: Air Power, Not
Peacekeepers," opinion. Wall Street Journal, December 9, 1994, p.
A16; "Inferior U.N. or Superior Coalition Force?" opinion. Wall
Street Journal, May 3, 1995, p. A14; "Beyond the Cold War: Foreign
Policy in the 21st Century; Alternatives to Negotiating Genocide"
(with Gregory S. Jones), opinion. Wall Street Journal, May 3, 1995,
p. A14; "Chirac's Challenge on Bosnia," opinion. Wall Street
Journal, July 20, 1995, p. A12; "Relentless Diplomacy and Mass
Murder," opinion. Wall Street Journal, September 5, 1995, p. A14;
"NATO: Precise Power, Incoherent Goals," opinion. Wall Street
Journal, October 19, 1995, p. A22; "Magic Tricks Can't Disguise

This About Bosnia," opinion, Wall Street Journal, November 15,

1995, p. A20; "Since Bosnia Has Been Reduced to This...," opinion.
Wall Street Journal, December 12, 1995, p. A20; "The Cold War is
Over and Over and. . . ," opinion. Wall Street Journal, October 1,

1996, p. A22; "A Photo-op Foreign Policy," opinion. Wall Street
Journal, October 23, 1996, p. A22; and "Boris Yeltsin as Abraham
Lincoln," in Stjepan G. Mestrovic, ed.. The Conceit of Innocence:
Losing the Conscience of the West in the War Against Bosnia, College
Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 1997, pp. 200-207.

168. See Albert Wohlstetter and Margaret Thatcher, "What
the West Must Do in Bosnia," an open letter to President William
J. Clinton, opinion. Wall Street Journal, September 2, 1993, p. A12.

169. See Albert Wohlstetter and Gregory Jones, "'Breakthrough'
in North Korea?" opinion. The Wall Street Journal, November 4,
1994, p. A12.

170. Quoted by Fialka, "Veteran 'Lone Ranger' Strategist Packs
Firepower with Cold-Eyed Outlook on Soviet Nuclear Policy," p.

56.

171. President Ronald Reagan, "Remarks at the Presentation
Ceremony for the Presidential Medal of Freedom," East Room,
White House, Washington, DC, November 5, 1985, available from

www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/speeches/1985/110785a.htm.

172. Quoted by Herzog, p. 68.

173. James Digby and J. J. Martin, "On Not Confusing
Ourselves: Contributions of the Wohlstetters to U.S. Strategic
Thought," in Marshall, Martin, and Rowen, On Not Confusing
Ourselves: Essays on National Security Strategy in Honor of Albert and
Roberta Wohlstetter, quotes from pp. 5 and 3.

174. Roberta Wohlstetter, Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision,
p. 401.

175. Albert Wohlstetter, No Highway to High Purpose, emphasis
added.

I. ANALYSIS AND DESIGN OF STRATEGIC POLICY

Commentary: How He Worked
Henry S. Rowen

Albert Wohlstetter (whom for brevity's sake I shall refer to
simply as AW) made large contributions to U.S. national security
thinking and actions from the 1950s into the 1990s — and arguably
beyond — through his ideas, his research findings and those of his
associates, and the activities of those he mentored. This chapter
focuses on his style of work, the unusual and inventive ways
in which he addressed problems of policy, and how he applied
his talents to some of the most urgent and difficult issues of the
nuclear era.

We know how things turned out in what came to be known
as the Cold War, although disputes endure on the correctness of
various decisions. (One is reminded of Zhou Enlai's answer to
the question about the French Revolution: "Too soon to tell.")
The challenges posed at the time were novel and of the utmost
seriousness. Enormously destructive weapons had suddenly
appeared, first nuclear fission ones, then even more powerful
thermonuclear bombs. Key effects of these weapons were poorly
known for some time, especially radioactive fallout. Although
it was not a big surprise to the Manhattan Project scientists, the
first Soviet atomic bomb test of August 29, 1949, was a political
shock. The United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist
Republics (USSR) were also developing novel delivery systems,
notably long-range ballistic missiles, which when mated with
nuclear warheads posed unique dangers and new uncertainties.
Our security establishment was slow to understand adequately
the military significance of these technological innovations.
According to Tom Schelling: "I think it took the United States
at least 2 decades to learn how to think about nuclear weapons
policy after 1945."^ The phrase "at least" is warranted; arguably,
we still aren't quite there.

Throughout his career in strategy, AW worked to improve
thinking about the role and consequences of nuclear weapons.
One finding from AW's work, soon acted upon, was the need for
better protection and control of nuclear forces. The U.S. Air Force
had asked him and his associates to examine the large overseas
base-building program for our strategic bomber force. Their
investigation had consequences not only for that program, but

also for the basing and operations of the strategic bomber force at
home — and for our missile forces that were to come, and for much
more.

AW came to wide attention to those interested in foreign policy,
especially in nuclear weapons issues, with the publication of his
article, "The Delicate Balance of Terror" (1959), in Foreign Affairs.
There, he challenged the prevailing assumption that nuclear war
was impossible, or had a vanishingly small likelihood, laying out
reasons why the nuclear balance was precarious and why the
requirements for deterring such a war were stringent. He soon
came to be described as an eminent strategist or, more dubiously
in some quarters, as a "defense intellectual."^

AW went on to become a critic of widely held views about the
"arms race" with the Soviet Union in general, and the "nuclear
arms race" in particular, writing in the mid-1970s that the facts
of nuclear arms competition did not fit much of the rhetoric
about nuclear arms racing. This led to a vigorous disputation in
print. From AW's perspective, the issues were not that dangerous
"gaps" existed between American and Russian nuclear offensive
forces (as American politicians often had claimed in the 1950s), or
that there was an arms race spiraling out control in the 1960s or
1970s, but that relevant facts were being ignored and the wrong
questions were being asked.

Efforts to understand nuclear weapons and their destructive-
ness led AW to try to break the pattern that had dominated air
power from its inception, namely, the indiscriminate "strategic
bombing" that had caused vast destruction to civilians during
World War II. Over many decades, he worked to promote
technologies of precision and control that would make it more
possible to hit military targets without killing innocent bystanders.
He saw that advances in technologies of sensing and computation
could produce vast improvements in the accuracy with which
munitions could be delivered. This capability began to be used
near the end of the Vietnam War and was widely displayed
during the Kosovo operation against Serbia and the two Gulf
wars. It has transformed air operations. Hard as it might be for
some people to believe, the concept of destroying military targets
while sparing civilians is now at the core of American air power
doctrine. The "Delicate Balance" aside, perhaps this was his most
important intellectual and practical security contribution.

Throughout AW's career, a major concern of him and his
team was the future of Europe, a region seen as the main stake
in the great power competition. This meant that decisions about

nuclear forces, both long range and short, needed to be viewed
with the implications for Europe in mind. At the same time, he
also pushed our political and military leaders to give more weight
to the flanks of NATO and pay much more attention to "out of
area" contingencies — or what he called "lesser excluded cases."
The 1991 Gulf War and the conflict over Bosnia and Kosovo later
in the decade dramatically demonstrated the critical importance
of these sorts of contingencies.

Another interest from an early date was the spread of the
nuclear bomb to more countries. It was known from near the
beginning of the nuclear era that the line between civilian and
military uses of atomic energy was thin, but this fact was often
obscured — and still is — in our policy actions. An egregious case
was the Eisenhower Administration's Atoms for Peace program. By
actively disseminating civilian nuclear applications, the program
was engaged in (as the title of AW's 1976 Foreign Policy article
would later put it) "Spreading the Bomb without Quite Breaking
the Rules." The U.S. government continues to behave in a wildly
inconsistent way on this topic.

These and other accomplishments came from a high
intelligence used in ways that were at least unusual, and in
combination arguably unique. Below, I consider key aspects of
AW's style of work.

I. WORKING ON A PROBLEM, REFRAMING OBJECTIVES

It is especially important, and sometimes very difficult, to
get objectives right in a policy analysis. A competent analyst who
works on such a situation will try to identify available alternatives,
to assess their respective costs and benefits in light of given
objectives, and recommend a course of action. This is necessary,
but it is often where intellectual activity stops.

It is not enough to assume a merely one-sided conflict with
a potential adversary. Albert Wohlstetter sometimes used the
term opposed systems to characterize the sort of competitive —
and interactive — situation in which one actor (for instance, a
government, a military organization or even a nonstate group)
may try to do things that at least partially frustrate some key
objectives and activities of others — and vice versa. The policy
problem, objectives, and alternatives can look quite different
when the game, so to speak, is seriously two-sided (or three- or
four-sided), that is, when the frustrating activities are reciprocal.

and each actor is both frustrating others while being frustrated in
return.^

Characteristically, AW not only addressed the policy problem
as it was initially posed. He also undertook a more comprehensive
inquiry to consider a fuller range of alternatives available to all
relevant actors, to evaluate not only the means of policy but also
the ends.* Sometimes this would lead him to reframe the problem
in a more fundamental way and to invent new options. More
value, sometimes a great deal more, can be added to the analysis
if the problem is redefined in a way that stays true to the spirit
of the original question, but also brings to light more crucial yet
underappreciated objectives and new ways of achieving them.

Basing and Operating SAC's Bomber Force in a Competitive
Environment.

A crucial issue in the immediate aftermath of World War
II was what to do about nuclear weapons. Their novelty and
extraordinary destructiveness made this both urgent and
difficult. By August 1949 the Soviet Union had the atomic bomb.
The hydrogen bomb was in the offing, and ballistic missiles were
being developed. The Red Army was in the middle of Europe. In
1950 North Korea had attacked the South with Soviet support and
later that year China had intervened militarily.

The United States was making jet bombers in large numbers.
From 1951, the United States built over 2,000 B-47s, a medium-
range bomber with a roundtrip operating radius of 2,100 miles,
while the longer-range B-52 bomber, which did not depend on
overseas bases, was being developed. Aerial refueling as a means
of extending the range of medium-range bombers without using
overseas bases was also being developed.

The problem originally posed to the RAND Corporation by
the U.S. Air Force's assistant for bases was to look at the far-flung,
rapidly expanding system of bases of the Strategic Air Command
(SAC) that were being built in the United Kingdom (UK), Morocco,
Alaska, and elsewhere, to enable our medium-range bombers in
wartime to reach the Soviet Union, return, and repeatedly go
back. However, AW and his team quickly realized a critical yet
underappreciated aspect of this problem: these planned bases
could also be reached by Soviet bombers, a potential vulnerability
made critically serious now that the USSR had the atomic bomb.

After much study and analysis, AW's team recommended
stopping the elaborate program to build bases overseas and strictly
limiting their use (specifically, any overseas bases surviving an
enemy attack) to austere refueling points for SAC's medium-
range bomber aircraft.^ By the end of 1955, the U.S. Air Force had
accepted and begun implementing this recommendation.

Protecting Our Power to Strike Back Became a Crucial
Objective.

Attention then turned to the situation of our force at home. It
was assumed to be safe, but an investigation into the possibility of
a Soviet sneak attack on the small number of continental bases on
which the strategic force was located made that assumption look
untenable. AW and his team completed an initial report on this
issue.* As Philip Taubman would write in Secret Empire: Eisenhower,
the CIA, and the Hidden Story of America's Space Espionage (2003):
"The report, published on April 15, 1953, stunned Gardner [Special
Assistant to the Secretary of the Air Force] and other officials in
Washington. . . . The lightly defended SAC bases . . . were ideal
targets for atomic attack." Taubman would add: "The import was
clear and breathtaking: For the first time in its history, the United
States was vulnerable to a crippling attack from overseas, and
would find it difficult, if not impossible, to retaliate after being
struck."^

Over the next 3 years, AW and his team worked to understand
the issues raised by SAC's potential vulnerabilities on the
continental United States, and to identify — and also invent and
design— ways to mitigate these vulnerabilities. This work had
a large and rapid impact on U.S. decisions regarding nuclear
forces.

A key idea emerging was that relative risk could dominate
decisions in certain situations rather than the widely assumed
perception of absolute risk. To put it another way, in extreme
circumstances it could actually look less risky for decisionmakers
to use nuclear weapons than not to use them. This argument was
novel — and contested — but from it came the idea of protecting
our power to strike back after a nuclear attack in order to affect the
way a potential nuclear aggressor would view the relative risks of
a first strike. This concept soon became an essential aspect of the
U.S. military posture.*

More broadly, AW argued that the requirements for estab-
lishing a credible and safe nuclear deterrent were stringent and

not automatic. There were several reasons for this. One was the
possibility of operational accidents (compare the August 28, 2007,
loading of nuclear-armed missiles on a U.S. Air Force bomber by
mistake and its subsequent flight of several thousand miles) or
misjudgements higher in the chain of command.

A second reason was that whatever U.S. decisionmakers
might believe about nuclear weapons and their use, Soviet
decisionmakers might have a different set of beliefs. In fact, the
doctrine of nuclear warfighting to win a major conflict had a
strong hold there (the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, known
also as SALT, notwithstanding) until well into the 1980s, long
after U.S. authorities had come to realize nuclear warfighting's
futility as a war -winning strategy.'

The third stemmed from the perceived vulnerability of
Western Europe. Although the U.S. might be able to deter a Soviet
preclusive attack against its nuclear-armed strategic forces, it was
far from clear that such deterrence would necessarily extend to
other forms of potential Soviet aggression. The Red Army was
in Europe's center and was judged to be stronger than NATO's
forces.^" Our putative atomic superiority — no longer monopoly —
was widely seen in American officialdom as the chief guarantor
of Europe's security. But what did this mean? The answer given
by Eisenhower's Secretary of State John Foster Dulles in 1954 was
that the United States would respond to military provocation "at
places and with means of our own choosing." He also said, "Local
defense must be reinforced by the further deterrent of massive
retaliatory power." This idea, which came to be known as the
doctrine of "massive retaliation," implied using nuclear weapons
first, yet it was also widely held in the United States, including by
high officials, that nuclear weapons were unusable because of the
vast devastation that would result. These conflicting views posed
a difficulty that long persisted. ^^

In the late 1950s, a then little-known professor at Harvard,
Henry Kissinger, argued that it might be possible to fight a
limited nuclear war in Europe, limited in the sense that it would
not escalate to attacks on U.S. or Soviet territory. ^^ This argument
did not have much appeal in Europe, the putative war zone,
nor as it turned out in Washington. AW addressed this topic in
"The Delicate Balance of Terror" (the relevant passage of which
deserves quoting here because, in later disputes over the nuclear
"arms race," he was sometimes charged with believing in limited
nuclear war as a policy goal):

Whether or not nuclear weapons favor the West in lim-
ited war, there still remains the question of whether such
limitations could be made stable. ... It remains to be
seen whether there are any equilibrium points between
the use of conventional and all-out weapons. In fact the
emphasis on the gradualness of the graduated deterrents
may be misplaced. The important thing would be to find
some discontinuities if these steps are not to lead too
smoothly to general war. Nuclear limited war, simply
because of the extreme swiftness and unpredictability of
its moves, the necessity of delegating authority to local
commanders, and the possibility of sharp and sudden
desperate reversals of fortune, would put the greatest
strain on the deterrent to all-out thermonuclear war.

AW's skepticism about limited nuclear war as a policy was
consistent with the crucial aim of controlling such forces to prevent
inadvertent use by us, and to deal with first use of nuclear
weapons by the Soviet Union, or later China, or any other nation
with them. His answer to the Eisenhower/ Dulles doctrine of "first
use" by us was that the West needed to enable NATO to defend
Europe with conventional forces. (However, AW did not clearly
articulate a "no-first use" policy, and was later chastised for this.)
The discriminate use of force, especially through a distinction
between military forces to be attacked and civilian noncombatants
to be avoided, became a consistent theme in his work from the
late 1950s onward.

II. PAYING CLOSE ATTENTION TO THE DATA

An important aspect of Albert Wohlstetter's style is shown in
the name he chose for the research organization that he created:
Pan Heuristics, or learning about all things. The excessively
ambitious "pan" part of the name was mitigated by "heuristics,"
an informal approach to solving problems in the spirit of being
roughly right rather than being precisely wrong. The idea of "pan
heuristics" speaks to AW's strong commitment to gathering and
understanding as much data relevant to a policy problem as he
could.

Among people who became well known as strategists, AW
was probably unique in having industrial experience. During

World War II, he worked in quality control and management at
a factory manufacturing power-generation equipment for Allied
field communications, and after the war, in prefabricated housing
design and mass-production. This trained him to pay careful
attention to operations and technical data.

In a November 1968 letter to the distinguished British military
historian Michael Howard, AW had the following to say about his
work style in the aforementioned Base Study and Vulnerability
Study:

For two years, before issuing a summary report and ex-
posing the results to the scrutiny of experienced officers
in the Air Staff, SAC and other relevant field commands,
and for three years before issuing the final report, we
looked systematically and in great detail at the problem
of bringing bombs, bombers, bomber crews and tanker
aircraft together with equipment in combat-ready con-
dition and getting bombers to targets and back along
routes that minimized their exposure to defenses. That
included problems of equipment reliability, radar warn-
ing, communications and control, and above all logistics.
We examined the joint effects of these many factors on
"the costs of extending bomber radius; on how the en-
emy may deploy his defenses, and the numbers of our
bombers lost to enemy fighters; on logistics costs; and
on base vulnerability and our probable loss of bombers
on the ground." We did not begin with any theory about
the vulnerability of SAC. The second-strike theory of de-
terrence grew out of this empirical study; we didn't start
with it.

If the study said nothing that was new, it would hardly
have received such attention. If it had been unsound, it
could not have survived the extraordinarily widespread
and detailed scrutiny it was given by the responsible
military men whose work — and lives — it affected."

This background helps to show why AW was skeptical about the
significance of claimed "bomber gaps" (assertions of American
vulnerability in the mid-1950s made on the grounds that the
United States allegedly had fallen behind the USSR in the
numbers of bombers) or "missile gaps" (a similar assertion made.

100

among others, by presidential candidate Senator John F. Kennedy
concerning intercontinental ballistic missiles).

AW's view was that such "gap" claims — which turned out
to be false — missed the point: that it was not the "bean count"
of such weapons in peacetime that mattered most, but what the
balance of capabilities would look like after one side or the other
had struck first. In short, one needed to consider not just raw
numbers, but also the potential interactions of the two sides. This
required, in part, doing as best one could to look at relevant data,
recognizing that not all of it was accessible.

Learning from Many Disciplines: RAND in the 1950s.

AW felt a need to learn the basics about many fields relevant
to the topics on which he was working — and he had the talent
and determination to do so. The RAND Corporation of the 1950s
and 1960s was an ideal environment for doing this. It had a broad
mandate to explore topics that fit under the heading of national
security, thanks to the wisdom of the U.S. Air Force. RAND's first
president, Frank Collbohm, and his management team assembled
talents in many fields: e.g., mathematics, physics, engineering,
and the social sciences. RAND people did pioneering work on
satellite reconnaissance, telecommunications, civil defense, game
theory, applications of cost-benefit analysis, finance, and history.
Two future Nobel laureates in economics, William Sharpe and
Harry Markowitz, were members of the RAND staff when they
did the work for which they were later honored. Many excellent
scientists, physical and social, and mathematicians came as
visitors for varying periods.^*

From this extraordinarily favorable research environment,
AW gained access to a wealth of talent in many fields — talent
that for the most part was willing to work across disciplines
on large, complex questions. As Andrew Marshall (who made
important contributions to strategic thinking at RAND, and who
has served for many years as the Director of the Pentagon's Office
of Net Assessment) would later remark: "While the group of real
strategists at RAND probably never numbered more than about
25 people, the overall quality, in sheer intelligence and intellectual
breadth, is simply astonishing."^'

From Roberta Wohlstetter, who worked as a historian in
RAND's social sciences division, AW got help on many matters,
including those related to organizational and psychological

101

aspects of behavior. It is impossible for someone outside of the
family to know how much of what AW accomplished was due to
her direct or indirect help. Roberta herself was an accomplished
scholar whose Bancroft Prize-winning Pearl Harbor: Warning
and Decision (1962) will long be cited as perhaps the best book
ever written on military intelligence. Her 1976 study. The Buddha
Smiles: Absent-Minded Peaceful Aid and the Indian Bomb, showed
how India had exploited civil nuclear cooperation from the United
States and Canada to make its bomb. (There was a flair for book
and article titles in that family.) Among her many talents was
that of analyzing the character and motivations of leaders. The
husband-wife team also had several joint publications on Cuba,
for instance.

On the occasion of awarding the Presidential Medal of
Freedom to the Wohlstetters, President Reagan spoke of Roberta's
intimate personal and professional partnership with AW:

I daresay that she has frankly enjoyed posing the same
penetrating questions to her husband that she has to the
intellectual and political leaders of the country. And that
is certainly one explanation for the clarity and persua-
siveness of his own voluminous words on strategy, poli-
tics, and world affairs.^*

Experts Needed, but Not as Seers.

AW learned much from specialists in many fields. He saw
large decisions affecting war and the conduct of operations as
depending not only on political insights, but also on inputs from
such experts. But he was wary of specialists who opined with an
air of authority on topics outside of their expertise when they had
not seriously worked on these topics.

Indeed, there were a number of physicists who knew about
the confined topic of nuclear weapons and their effects, but who
did not hesitate to pronounce on matters related to strategic
nuclear force operations without having carefully studied these
operations, and without any particular claims of knowledge as
to the aims and strategy of Soviet leaders. He described such
experts, especially those who distilled nuclear-age policy choices
to decisions between living in "One World or None," as feeling:

102

charged with a prodigious mission and a great moral ur-
gency. Spurred by an apocalyptic vision of world annihi-
lation, they urge a drastic transformation in the conduct
of world affairs in the immediate future. They have been
passionately sure that the choices are stark and clear: an-
nihilation on the one hand or a paradise on earth. ^^

He continued:

This vision of the responsibility of the scientists, "a
greater responsibility than is pressing on any other body
of men," puts him in a very different role from the sci-
entist as technologist or the scientist dealing by tentative
and empirical methods with broader questions or cardi-
nal choices. It is fortified ... by the related notion of the
scientist as specially endowed — a seer or prophet.

. 18

He also pointed to the rapid switch in views on fundamentals
by some distinguished scientists. Advocates of building active
defenses and fallout shelters against nuclear attack soon saw
these things as fueling the arms race. Of course, he saw nothing
wrong in principle with people changing their views. (He might
have quoted, but did not. Lord Keynes: "When the facts change I
change my views; what do you do. Sir"?) But these changes raised
questions about their foresight, sometimes right and sometimes
wrong. As a group, these scientists were not seers.

The scientist and novelist Sir Charles Percy Snow addressed
the difficulty of communications between specialists in the
physical sciences and the humanities in his Godkin Lecture, "The
Two Cultures."" (Sir Charles could have included the social
sciences as well.) Snow had claimed that the cardinal choices
can be fully understood only by scientists, even though in "legal
form" these choices are made by non-scientists exposed to advice
of only a few experts.

AW was critical of Snow's account of how Britain's wartime
leaders made decisions, countering that the reality was a good deal
more complex, filled with more salient participants than Snow
had allowed. More important, AW maintained that although
civilian political leaders might lack expertise, they could be made
to understand what was at stake in such cardinal choices.

103

III. BEYOND ANALYSIS TO DESIGN AND INVENTION

Only in a limited sense is the pubic interest served by finding
the best among established choices. It is sometimes better to
invent or design new ones. This does not come naturally to many
people who are otherwise highly competent. It requires a certain
mindset, akin to that of an inventor or an architect. AW had such
a mentality.

Controlling Forces: Failing Safe.

Few — if any — topics since we have had nuclear weapons have
been more important than the rules for launching them. In their
1956 study, Protecting U.S. Power to Strike Back in the 1950's and
1960's (R-290), AW and his colleagues recognized that ambiguous
warning signals raised two risks for the Strategic Air Command:
false alarm, which could lead to accidental or unauthorized uses
of nuclear weapons, and false assurance, which could leave U.S.
strategic forces vulnerable in the event of an actual attack.

To deal with these related risks, AW's team invented and
then recommended a "Fail-Safe" operating procedure (later
called "Positive Control") by which SAC, when confronted with
ambiguous warning of a potential attack, would evacuate and
protectively scramble its nuclear-armed bomber aircraft without
actually committing them to combat — and without risking war by
mistake. R-290 explained:

By a fail-safe procedure we mean one in which the bomb-
ers will return to base after reaching a pre-designated
point en route — unless they receive an order to contin-
ue. (Without a fail-safe procedure, this initial decision
comes close to being the final decision; without recall it
is the final decision.)^"

The alternative to "Fail-Safe" was known as "Recall," in which
combat-ready bombers would not only take off based on (possibly
mistaken) warning, but also make their way to pre-designated
targets. The only way to stop such bombers from attacking their
targets would be, as this procedure's name suggests, to recall
them with explicit communication. But "Recall" was fraught with
dangers. AW would later recollect having said in a briefing to the
Strategic Air Command, "There aren't any good ways of starting
World War III, but that would surely be one of the worst. "^^

104

In Autumn 1957, SAC conducted a test called FRESH
APPROACH, which simulated the recall of the alert force by radio
(i.e., using a "fail un-safe" procedure). The after-action report was
sobering:

... of the ten airborne alert aircraft, one experienced HF
[high frequency radio frequency] failure and one failed
to monitor HF frequencies as briefed. The eight remain-
ing aircraft . . . did not receive the test message on HF. All
ten aircraft received UHF contact from the 9th Bombard-
ment Wing command post, [but] Mountain Home tower
and McChord tower were not received. All UHF mes-
sages received from the 9th Bombardment Wing were
after the aircraft had struck the target and were inbound to
the local area [emphasis added].^^

SAC instituted Fail-Safe by the Spring of 1958.

It is worth noting that when the movie Fail Safe (1964) needed
drama, it found it by showing the opposite of "Positive Control,"
the possible consequence of having a "fail-dangerous" recall
procedure — the procedure in place before the change in 1958
designed and recommended by the AW team. This topic, like
several others dealt with by AW and team, has current salience.
For example, have India and Pakistan introduced equivalent fail-
safe procedures in their nuclear forces?^^

Challenge of Protecting Missiles, as well as Command,
Control, and Communications.

By the mid-1950s it was becoming evident that any place in the
United States could soon be reached by intercontinental ballistic
missiles, then under development in both the Soviet Union and
the United States. They could arrive with little warning and with
no possibility then of interception. The main response of SAC
to this danger was to keep some aircraft on a high state of alert,
ready for quick takeoff or even aloft, in a crisis. These solutions
had their problems because early warning was uncertain and
keeping bombers aloft for long periods was costly. But a much
more difficult question was how to base our own ICBMs. The
first generation of ICBMs, Atlas and Titan missiles, were large,
fragile, exposed (think of the space vehicles at the Kennedy Space
Center), and vulnerable to nuclear weapons detonated even some
miles away.

105

AW and his team sought to invent and design new ways
to make U.S. strategic forces safe from missile attack. As part
of their investigation into fixing the vulnerability of bombers
on their bases in the United States, thought had been given to
blast-resistant shelters. The first generation of enemy ICBMs
was expected to be inaccurate, which meant that blast shelters,
in principle, might provide adequate protection against expected
blast effects. However, the prevailing view of civil engineering
experts was discouraging: only 30-40 pounds per square inch
(p.s.i.) of resistance to peak overpressure (that is, to the blast
effects of a nuclear explosion) was thought to be feasible, a level
short of adequacy, and even this would be costly.

This perceived shortfall led AW to inquire more deeply into
what was known about the blast effects of nuclear weapons
and the technology of blast-resistant structures. He got Paul
Weidlinger, a brilliant structural engineer whom he had met
in the 1940s, interested in this topic. Weidlinger soon came up
with a design that could withstand peak overpressures an order
of magnitude greater than most had thought possible. It turned
out that while these improved blast-resistant structures could
not be cost-effectively applied to aircraft or the first generation
of large and liquid-fueled missiles, they could be applied to the
much smaller and tougher Minuteman missiles by basing them
underground in what later became known as "silos. "^*

Weidlinger then came up with designs for underground silo
structures that could withstand overpressures approaching 1,000
p.s.i., and later extended blast resistance to even higher levels.
After the skepticism of the extant authorities on this topic was
overcome, Weidlinger's design approach became the solution. It
was not expected to last forever because missiles would become
more and more accurate, but it was good solution for many
decades (and indeed is still in use).

To take another important example, a major invention came
out of a question that AW had asked of a RAND engineer named
Paul Baran: "What would happen if the key switching centers of
AT&T were destroyed?" Baran's answer: The total collapse of our
national communications system.

Inquiries to remedy this problem led Baran in 1964 to invent
the concepts of "hot-potato routing" (decentralized and distrib-
uted communications systems) and segmenting data into "message
blocks" (today, packet-switching networks), two concepts that
could be used to design a more robust, survivable command.

106

control, and communications system less prone to disruption and
degradation. Baran's concepts provided the impetus for major
advances in telecommunications — and contributed to what would
become the Internet.

Persistent Efforts in Persuasion: Communicating the Analysis
and Design's Results.

It was not AW's style to write a report or an article and sim-
ply put it in the mail. If the project was worth doing, it was worth
a marketing effort. He took great pains to learn about the views
and positions of the decisionmakers involved, and to design argu-
ments that would be most effective. This meant spending a lot of
time on the road, especially in Washington, but also at the Stra-
tegic Air Command's headquarters in Omaha, NATO headquar-
ters, and elsewhere. To AW, these were not simply "briefings."
For one thing, they were usually not brief; for another, these were
two-way exchanges, for the presenters themselves learned much
from such sessions.

AW's writings were closely reasoned, sometimes eloquent,
complete with salient data. But they were not quick and easy reads.
Nor was he a person of few words. Training in mathematical logic
produced precision in expression, but sometimes a denseness that
needed parsing. Here, too, Roberta must have been a big help.

IV. DISPUTATIONS

The Ballistic Missile Defense Dispute.

Albert Wohlstetter' s works often evoked vigorous responses —
some highly positive, some constructive, some hugely critical,
and some scurrilous. ^^ Consider the case of the proposed active
defense against ballistic missiles (BMD) in behalf of which AW
became an advocate. He had a belief that technically it could be
made to work in certain situations. He certainly found the "arms
race" arguments of many of the opponents of BMD objectionable.
Why, in principle, should one object to being able to defend
oneself against attack?

In 1969, the Senate Armed Services Committee held a debate
on the pros and cons of the Safeguard ballistic missile defense
system. The purpose of Safeguard was to protect Minuteman
missiles from nuclear attack, and the debate centered on how well

107

such a defense might perforin. AW, Paul Nitze, John Foster, and
others gave detailed arguments as to why it was a good idea, and
their opponents, such as George Rathjens and Jerome Wiesner, as
to why it was not.

What turned out to be remarkable about this exchange was
not so much its content, but the fact that the Operation Research
Society of America (ORSA), at AW's request, did a study of the
professionalism of his opponents' contributions. Three faculty
members from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
who had testified at the Senate hearings, including MIT' s president,
objected to the standing and capacity of ORSA to conduct such an
investigation. ORSA went ahead anyway. It found faults on both
sides of the debate, but singled out for criticism the testimony of
the opponents, including those from MIT. In striking contrast, the
report found "no significant defects" in AW's testimony, and cited
one paper that he had submitted to the Senate Armed Services
Committee as "a model for the professional and constructive
conduct of a debate over important and technical issues. "^'^

AW won this debate on points, but was he right? At the time,
AW's desire to establish the correctness of the principle that
defending oneself is good seems to have overcome his usually
sound technical and economic sense. As observed above, one
might object to a specific program on grounds of inadequate
cost-effectiveness. Here, ballistic missile defenses have struggled
against technologically competent attackers in which the offense
can adopt countermeasures (e.g., multiple independently tar-
getable reentry vehicles, decoys) to negate them. The United States
has had active defense programs under development for 50 years
and has deployed some systems (one Safeguard site in North
Dakota, soon demolished) without achieving notable confidence
that the substantial expenditures have been worthwhile. We are
still trying, now with the goal of defending against less technically
advanced missiles from Iran or North Korea.

The Arms Race Dispute.

AW set off a fierce debate by questioning the existence of
a spiraling nuclear "arms race" in two articles published in the
mid-1970s. ^^ Here is a small sample of the views to which AW
responded: from John Newhouse, "America's forces apparently
served as both model and catalyst for the Russians"; from
journalist Leslie Gelb, "The common practice, as I think we all
know, has been to exaggerate and over dramatize"; from Jerome

108

Wiesner, president of MIT and former science adviser to President
Kennedy, the arms race makes "an ever-increasing likelihood of
war so disastrous that civilization, if not man himself, will be
eradicated"; from nuclear physicist Herbert York, who had served
on the Manhattan Project and as the first director of the Livermore
National Laboratory, we should "slow down the rate of weapons
innovation, and hence reduce the frequency of introduction of
ever more complex and threatening weapons"; from chemists
George Kistiakowsky, a leading Manhattan Project participant,
and MIT's George Rathjens, "any understanding that slowed the
rate of development and change of strategic systems would have
an effect in the right direction." In short, the dangers perceived by
the "arms race theorists" (as AW called them) were not merely —
or only — the waste of resources in adding to the nuclear stockpile,
but catastrophe.

AW asked exactly what was going on in the putative "arms
race." He began by dissecting the term:

When we talk of "arms" are we referring to the total
budget spent on strategic forces? The number of stra-
tegic vehicles or launchers? The number of weapons?
The total explosive energy that could be released by all
strategic weapons? The aggregate destructive area of
these weapons? Or are we concerned about qualitative
change — that is alterations in unit performance charac-
teristics — the speed of an aircraft or missile, its accuracy,
the blast resistance of its silo, the concealability of its
launch point, the scale and sharpness of optical photos
or other sensitive devices, the controllability of a weap-
on and its resistance to accidental or unauthorized use?
When we talk of a "race" what do we imply about the
rate at which the race is run, about the ostensible goal of
the contest, about how the "race" is generated, about the
nature of the interaction among strategic adversaries?^*

Whatever arms racing was about, AW objected to the use of
such words as "explosive," "spiraling," or "uncontrolled" to
characterize the U.S.-USSR strategic "competition" (his preferred
word) in nuclear arms.

To illustrate his point, AW compared forecasts over time, and
also with reality as we gradually came to understand it, of Soviet
ICBMs, submarine-launched missiles, and bombers. He found
indicators on the American side mostly to have peaked in the late

109

1950s and early 1960s, and then to have declined to the early 1970s.
Given increases in these categories on the Soviet side during those
years of U.S. decline, he asserted that we were not "racing" them.
Moreover, he maintained that some of the technical advances had
helped to stabilize the nuclear balance: the hardening of silos,
permissive action links, technology that enabled warheads — and
so missiles — to be smaller, hence mobile, hence safer from attack
(under the sea or, in the Soviet case, mobile on land); and increases
in accuracy, along with smaller missiles, that reduced potential
collateral damage to civilians. Advances in technology that made
for a more stable relationship were good.

AW agreed that for the United States to have more aircraft
or missiles simply because the Soviets were making more of
them, or were assumed to have this intention, was a bad idea.
However, he argued that his opponents ignored crucial aspects
of the strategic competition by assuming that a simple action-
reaction process was at work, or that the Soviet Union was aiming
for a small "minimum deterrent" force. Most fundamentally, he
disagreed that nuclear war was impossible simply because many
extremely destructive weapons existed, and worried that the
nuclear postures proposed by his opponents would foreclose the
possibility of limiting the scope of the conflict if war should break
out.

These articles garnered support and criticism. One criticism
was that he had chosen dates to favor his argument.^' Among the
critics, a phrase that caught on was supplied by the title of former
arms control agency official Paul Warnke's rejoinder: "Apes on a
Treadmill." It evoked the image of mindless building of nuclear
forces by both sides, something that could happen only if leaders
were mistakenly led to believe that they could gain an advantage
over nuclear-armed opponents.

This view led to the doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction
(dubbed "MAD" by Donald Brennan), that since only a few
nuclear weapons delivered on a city could produce vast damage,
why, then, buy more than the number needed to assure that
result? Arthur Steiner, a colleague of AW, identified it with two
propositions: (1) Don't attack weapons; aim at people; and (2)
Don't defend against the adversary's weapons.^" Motivations
for proposition (1) might be, don't attack his weapons because that
would be destabilizing and would lead to an arms race; or alternatively,
don't attack weapons because it can't be done successfully. Motivations

110

for proposition (2) might be, don't defend because it's a had idea; or
alternatively, don't defend because although it might he desirable it isn't
feasible. A large problem left inadequately addressed by MAD, and
often ignored by AW's critics, was how to defend Europe, which
was believed to be vulnerable to Warsaw Pact conventional attack.
Our policy was to use nuclear weapons first there if such an attack
was succeeding. In contrast, AW held that "most of those who
rely on tactical nuclear weapons as a substitute for disparities in
conventional forces have in general presupposed a cooperative
Soviet attacker, one who did not use atomic weapons himself."^^
Moreover, he added:

. . . nuclear limited war, simply because of the extreme
swiftness and unpredictability of its moves, the necessi-
ty of delegating authority to local commanders, and the
possibility of sharp and sudden desperate reversals of
fortune, would put the greatest strain on the deterrent to
all-out thermonuclear war. For this reason I believe that
it would be appropriate to emphasize the importance of
expanding a conventional capability realistically and,
in particular, research and development in non-nuclear
modes of warfare. ^^

This last sentence foreshadowed his long and successful campaign
to improve greatly the effectiveness of conventional airpower.

Civil vs. Military Uses of Nuclear Energy:
Revealing a Distinction without Much Difference.

It should not surprise that a logician would be skilled at
parsing distinctions. One was the purported distinction between
civilian and military uses of atomic energy. This was a highly
misleading distinction as dealt with politically. It is at the heart of
the international proliferation problem. Although the influential
Acheson-Lilienthal Report of 1946 on the potential and the
dangers of nuclear technology was initially optimistic about the
possibility of making civilian nuclear fuel hard to use in bombs,
its authors quickly saw the dangers and proposed that all nuclear
enterprises be run by an international authority. ^^ The Eisenhower
Administration blurred the distinction between civil and military
uses of nuclear energy with Atoms for Peace, a program which

111

accelerated the distribution of weapons-relevant civil nuclear
technology and know-how widely throughout the world.

The economic benefits have turned out to be modest so
far, but Atoms for Peace advanced the ability of many countries
to make the bomb on short notice by training people in nuclear
science and technology and giving them experience in handling
fissionable materials. Nuclear electric power, the main civilian
application, requires fissile material as a fuel, or yields it as a
by-product of the reaction process, or both. For various reasons
having to do with politics, both domestic and foreign, most of
the countries able to make the bomb on short notice — by now a
large number — have chosen not to do so. But as the cases of India
(written about perceptively by Roberta), Pakistan, North Korea
and (prospectively) Iran show, civilian applications can be used to
advance military ones. With Atoms for Peace, the U.S. Government
and others tried to make a distinction where there was not much
of a difference. His aforementioned 1976 article on "Spreading
the Bomb without Quite Breaking the Rules" described efforts by
policymakers to make such unrealistic distinctions.

The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), signed in 1968,
incorporates the manifest tensions, not to say confusions, on
this topic. It says that nuclear explosives will not be transferred
(Articles I and II), that safeguards will be accepted (Article III),
that all countries have an inalienable right to nuclear energy for
peaceful purposes in accordance with Articles I and II (Article
IV, paragraph 1), that nuclear technologies be shared (Article
IV, paragraph 2), and that all parties work towards nuclear
disarmament (Article VI). Article IV opened the door to acquiring
weapons-related capacities, and three countries are known to
have gone through it and violated their safeguards agreements:
Iraq in the period leading up to the first Gulf War, North Korea,
and Iran. Several that made the bomb had not signed the NPT:
India, Pakistan, Israel, and South Africa (which signed the NPT
after it had dismantled its bomb program).

When AW and his associates examined the problems posed
by civil nuclear energy's military potential in the 1970s, those
problems were not as evident as they are today. This work
highlighted matters that have become of great public concern in
the past decade. Inconsistencies abound. For instance, AW and his
associates noted that a major mission of the International Atomic
Energy Agency was to market nuclear energy around the world,
notably to developing countries. To this day, the IAEA still refers

112

to itself, with no apparent sense of irony, as the "Atoms for Peace
Agency."

It cannot be said that the behavior of governments has greatly
improved in this arena.

The Need to Use Power Discriminately: The Moral Dimension.

A theme that emerged in AW's work from an early point
was how to use military power more effectively against military
forces and avoid unintended harm to civilians.^* There were both
utilitarian and moral arguments for this. With nuclear weapons,
this was a challenge and, to some people, an oxymoron in the sense
that any use of nuclear weapons, no matter how limited in scope,
might quickly escalate and produce a holocaust. The predominant
view was that anything that would mitigate the destructiveness
of nuclear weapons would suggest that they could be rationally
used.

The question of objectives was addressed by the American
Catholic Bishops' Pastoral Letter on War and Peace in 1983.^^ AW
commented on this letter in "Bishops, Statesmen, and Other
Strategists on the Bombing of Innocents" (1983), a magisterial
review of central issues of nuclear strategy. He wrote:

By revising many times in public their pastoral let-
ter on war and peace, American Catholic bishops have
dramatized the moral issues which statesmen, using
empty threats to end the world, neglect or evade. For
the bishops stand in a long moral tradition which con-
demns the threat to destroy innocents as well as their
actual destruction. They try but do not escape reliance
on threatening bystanders. . . . The letter offers a unique
opportunity to examine the moral, political, and military
issues together, and to show that . . . threatening to bomb
innocents is not part of the nature of things. Nor has it
been, as is now widely claimed, an essential of deter-
rence from the beginning. Nor is it the inevitable result
of "modern technology."^''

He continued:

The bishops have been sending a message to strategists
in Western foreign-policy establishments — and to strate-
gists in the Western anti-nuclear counter-establishments.

113

It seems unequivocal: "Under no circumstances may nu-
clear weapons or other instruments of mass slaughter be
used for the purpose of destroying population centers or
other predominantly civilian targets." Though that only
restates an exemplary part of Vatican II two decades ear-
lier, it is far from commonplace. Nonetheless it should
be obvious to Catholics and non-Catholics alike. In-
formed realists in foreign-policy establishments as well
as pacifists should oppose aiming to kill bystanders with
nuclear or conventional weapons: indiscriminate West-
ern threats paralyze the West, not the East. We have ur-
gent political and military as well as moral grounds for
improving our ability to answer an attack on Western
military forces with less unintended killing, not to men-
tion deliberate mass slaughter. ^^

AW then criticized the bishops for adopting the position that it
was acceptable for us to have these weapons but never to use
them.

Having observed long ago that not even Genghis Khan
avoided combatants in order to focus solely on destroy-
ing noncombatants, I was grateful, on a first look at this
issue in the evolving pastoral letter, to find the bishops
on the side of the angels. Unfortunately, a closer read-
ing suggested that they were also on the other side. For,
while they sometimes say that we should not threaten to
destroy civilians, they say too that we may continue to
maintain nuclear weapons — and so implicitly threaten
their use as a deterrent — while moving toward perma-
nent verifiable nuclear and general disarmament; yet we
may not meanwhile plan to he able to fight a nuclear war even
in response to a nuclear attack [emphasis original].

Before that distant millennial day when all the world
disarms totally, verifiably, and irrevocably — at least in
nuclear weapons — if we should not intend to attack non-
combatants, as the letter says, what alternative is there to
deter nuclear attack or coercion? Plainly only to be able
to aim at the combatants attacking us, or at their equip-
ment, facilities, or direct sources of combat supply. That,
however, is what is meant by planning to be able to fight
a nuclear war — which the letter rejects.^*

114

Responses were abundant and mixed. It evoked praise by such
prominent people as Samuel Huntington, Aaron Wildavsky, and
Brent Scowcroft (on occasion an AW target). Among the critics
was the political scientist, Bruce Russett, who had been an adviser
to the bishops and who wrote that AW had distorted the bishops'
position, and that the final version of their letter had dropped
mention of non-use under all circumstances. Russett added he
wished that AW had "acknowledged the desirability of a no-first
use posture" (emphasis added) as being consistent with the views
expressed in the article.

V. RADICALLY REDUCING UNINTENDED HARM TO
CIVILIANS

AW examined the history of strategic bombing, an undertak-
ing of great imprecision such that if the target were in cities most
bombs would miss it and hit civilians. This inevitable inaccuracy
during World War II had led to a policy of deliberately target-
ing civilians, with the result that enormous destruction was done,
e.g., Tokyo, Hamburg, and Dresden. Obviously, the destruction
would be enormously greater with nuclear weapons aimed at
civilians. AW thought planning based on MAD targeting was
wrong on both utilitarian and moral grounds.

The alternative path that AW first suggested was a combina-
tion of making much lower-yield nuclear bombs and delivering
them with greater accuracy against solely military targets. He ob-
served that the thermonuclear process (as distinguished from the
fission one), contrary to the initial impression that it would only
enable bomb yields to be horrendously large, would actually per-
mit bombs with much smaller weights and yields to be made.

This combination never found enough support to be carried
out seriously, but a crucial extension of AWs idea did, one that
he worked on for many years. It was that advances in computing
and sensors might make it possible to destroy discrete targets with
non-nuclear weapons. As it turned out, several technologies made
this possible, as demonstrated in the First Gulf War (recall the im-
age of a cruise missile going down a boulevard in Baghdad and
turning to hit the defense ministry). Highly precise weapons were
then used against Serbia in 1999 and Iraq again in 2003. Of course,
the right targets had to be designated. We could now precisely hit

115

the wrong place, as in the bombing of the al Firdos air raid shelter
in Baghdad in 1991, or of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999.

Striking evidence of official acceptance of AW's ideas on
discriminate deterrence came in a Defense Department briefing
on March 5, 2003, 2 weeks before the invasion of Iraq, about our
"military practices and procedures to minimize casualties to non-
combatants during military operations."^' Such a public statement
about attack criteria in a war about to occur was extraordinary; its
substance was the opposite of the bombing goal against Germany
and Japan in World War II. This was the message:

For each military target, the potential for collateral
damage is reviewed and a decision made regarding:

■ Targets likely to result in noncombatant casualties

■ Targets likely to result in damage to noncombatant

structures;

■ Targets that affect protected sites;

■ Targets that serve both a military and civilian pur-

pose; and

■ Targets in close proximity to known human

shields.*"

The briefing added that the U.S. military would seek to reduce
collateral damage by using smaller weapons, shifting aim points
or the time attack to periods of low occupancy, as well as by dis-
persing of leaflets and of radio broadcasts telling people to stay
away from some places. That said, the Pentagon briefing also con-
ceded the inevitability of unintended casualties caused by techni-
cal malfunctions, human error, and the fog of war.

No doubt, there were cynics about this announcement, but
the ensuing air campaign showed that it was largely carried
out according to these principles. AW's long campaign to move
the United States away from indiscriminate and uncontrollable
military technologies had shown results.

"Never Eat an Unworthy Calorie" and Other Passions.

A recent book describes Albert Wohlstetter as "flamboyant
and eccentric."*^ Rather, he had standards, such as great attentive-
ness to food and wine. Here, his tendency towards excellence was
defended with the statement, "Never eat an unworthy calorie."

116

His passion toward work and life was a quality to be emulated.

Flamboyant he was not. But he did stand out in a crowd, es-
pecially in later years when he had a beard and mustache. He and
Roberta did much entertaining at home. As for going out, they
were more likely to be found watching a jazz ensemble than visit-
ing a nightclub. But they worked too hard to have much time for
such entertainments.

They cared about literature and the arts, music, architecture,
dance (their daughter Joan became a dancer — and mathematical
analyst). Many of their friends, especially in New York City, Los
Angeles, and Chicago, were scholars and people in the arts such
as the great art historian Meyer Shapiro and the mathematical lo-
gician Willard Van Orman Quine. At RAND their friends includ-
ed, among many others, sociologist Herbert Goldhamer, demog-
rapher Fred Ikle, economist Andrew Marshall, physicist Herman
Kahn, economist Charles Hitch, and engineer James Digby. In
Chicago one met or heard about economists Harry Johnson, Gary
Becker, Milton Friedman; the sociologist Edward Shils; law pro-
fessor Edward Levi (who became Attorney General in the Ford
Administration); Nobel Prize-winning novelist Saul Bellow; and
the remarkable polymath and social scientist (who had been at
RAND) Nathan Leites.

The objects of AW's work and life were large passions, and
although he tried to be fair to intellectual opponents, he didn't
always succeed. Wrong-headed people could be seen as fools, and
he didn't suffer fools easily. But excellence, in the end, trumped
and he certainly respected it.

ENDNOTES - Rowen

1. Thomas C. Schelling, "Global Warming: Intellectual
History and Strategic Choices," Remarks at the Fourth Annual
Hans Landsberg Memorial Lecture, Resources for the Future,
Washington, DC; December 6, 2006, available from www.rff.org/
rff/Events/upload/255 73_1 .pdf

2. Without doubt, the most bizarre tagging of AW was to
identify him with the views of the political philosopher Leo
Strauss, a fellow professor at the University of Chicago. AW must
have known Strauss, but in my many years of association with
AW, I cannot recall his name being mentioned once — in contrast
to those of the Chicago luminaries noted above.

117

3. Among the many misconceptions about AW's work is that
it involved game theory. It did not formally. Game theory, which
was being developed at RAND in the 1950s, deals with opposing
choices, but it was too underdeveloped and abstract to deal with
the kinds of concrete operational problems that AW and his team
had sought to address. It provided metaphors — not useful models
of interactions.

4. For more on Albert Wohlstetter's methodology, see
Wohlstetter, Theory and Opposed-System Design, D(L)-16001-1,
Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, August 1967, revised
January 1968, available from www.rand.org/ahout/history/
wohlstetter/DL16001.1/DL16001.1.html. AW's essay was later
published as "Theory and Opposed-System Design," Journal of
Conflict Resolution, Vol. 12, No. 3, September 1968, pp. 302-331. A
version of that essay is included in this edited volume.

5. See Albert J. Wohlstetter, Fred S. Hoffman, Robert J. Lutz,
and Henry S. Rowen, The Selection of Strategic Air Bases, R-244-S,
special staff report, Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, March
1, 1953, TOP SECRET, declassified on July 1, 1963, available from
www.albertwohlstetter.com/writings/19530301-AW-EtAl-R244S.pdf;
and Wohlstetter, Hoffman, Lutz, and Rowen, The Selection and
Use of Strategic Air Bases, R-266, final report, Santa Monica, CA:
RAND Corporation, April 1954, TOP SECRET, declassified circa
1961, available from www.rand.org/pubs/reports/R0266/.

6. See Albert Wohlstetter, Fred S. Hoffman, Robert J. Lutz,
and Henry S. Rowen, Vulnerability of U.S. Strategic Air Power to a
Surprise Enemy Attack in 1956, SM-15, Santa Monica, CA: RAND
Corporation, April 15, 1953.

7. Philip Taubman, Secret Empire: Eisenhower, the CIA, and the
Hidden Story of America's Space Espionage, New York, NY: Simon
and Schuster, 2003, p. 12.

8. Despite the rapid acceptance of the need for a protected
retaliatory power, the belief in using ballistic missile "launch-
on-waming" responses to an attack long persisted among some
high military authorities. It was a dangerous belief that entailed
fast and irrevocable decisions when information was likely to be
sparse and possibly wrong.

118

9. On this point, see Vojtech Mastny and Malcolm Byrne, eds.,
A Cardboard Castle? An Inside History of the Warsaw Pact, 1955-1991,
Budapest, Hungary: Central European University Press, 2005.

10. In the early 1960s, work done under the direction of
two of AW's former associates, the author of this chapter, and
more systematically by Alain Enthoven in the Pentagon's
Office of Systems Analysis, countered the view of Warsaw Pact
conventional superiority in Europe. Eventually, this counterview
became more widely accepted — notably after the rise of Solidarity
in Poland — although preserving the traditional argument of
Soviet superiority was seen by the U.S. Army as necessary for
budgetary reasons.

11. One effort to deal with this contradiction was offered by
Tom Schelling in a paper titled "The Threat that Leaves Something
to Chance." (This paper was published as a chapter in Schelling,
The Strategy of Conflict, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1960, pp. 187-203.) Here, the view was that it was not rational
to use nuclear weapons against an adversary that had them, but
uncertainty as to what would happen if there were actually a war
would induce caution all around. It was not a wholly comforting
theory despite its plausibility.

12. See Henry A. Kissinger, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy,
New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1957.

13. Albert Wohlstetter, "On the Genesis of Nuclear Strategy:
Letter to Michael Howard," unpublished, November 6, 1968,
revised circa April 1986 with additional material and annotations
by James Digby and Arthur Steiner and a prefatory note by
Michael Howard, Wohlstetter Papers, Writings, Box 187, Folder
22. The annotated version of this letter is available in this edited
volume.

14. The great mathematician, John von Neumann, was
the stimulus for the name of an early computer at RAND, the
Johnniac. Two economists of distinction who visited for some time
were Thomas Schelling and Kenneth Arrow, each of whom later
received the Nobel Prize in economics. Herbert Simon (another
Nobel laureate in economics) had a long working association with
rand's Allen Newell, doing work on human problem solving.

119

15. Andrew May, "What Made RAND Work?" unpublished
note based on discussions with Andrew Marshall, November
2006.

16. President Ronald Reagan, "Remarks at the Presentation
Ceremony for the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Albert and
Roberta Wohlstetter," East Room, White House, Washington, DC,
November 7, 1985, available from www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/
speeches/1985/110785a.htm.

17. Albert Wohlstetter, "Scientists, Seers and Strategy," Foreign
Ajfairs, Vol. 41, No. 3, April 1963, p. 471.

18. Ihid.

19. C. P. Snow, Science and Government: The Godkin Lectures at
Harvard, 1960, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961.

20. Albert J. Wohlstetter, Fred S. Hoffman, and Henry S. Rowen,
Protecting U.S. Power to Strike Back in the 1950s and 1960s, R-290,
staff report, Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, September 1,
1956, TOP SECRET, declassified circa 1960s, available from www.

albertwohlstetter.com/writings/19560901-AW-EtAl-R290.pdf

21. On this topic, see Albert Wohlstetter, "SAC Test 1957 of
Alert Bomber Response — Only 'Fail Unsafe'," April 29, 1985,
Wohlstetter Papers, Notes, Box 102, Folder 6, Tab H, p. 3.

22. Ibid., p. 4.

23. There has been public discussion of a very important
but different topic: Have the Indians and Pakistanis installed
Permissive Action Link (PALs) on their nuclear bombs — in effect,
combination locks? For more on PALs, see Fred C. Ikle, Gerald
J. Aronson, and Albert Madansky, On the Risk of an Accidental or
Unauthorized Nuclear Detonation, RM-2251, Santa Monica, CA:
RAND Corporation, October 15, 1958, esp. pp. 100-101 and 154,
available from www.rand.org/pubs/research_memoranda/RM2251/.

120

24. Before what levels of protection were determined to be
technically feasible at what cost, AW and Fred Hoffman did a set
of "break even" analyses on what such protection would be worth
in terms of survival of missiles. It was more than enough to fit
reality.

25. For a recently published criticism, see Richard Rhodes,

Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race, New York,
NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007.

26. See "Appendix III: Treatment of Operations-Research
Questions in the 1969 Debate," Operations Research: The Journal of
the Operations Research Society of America, Vol. 19, No. 5, September
1971, pp. 1175-1237. Quoted phrases appear on p. 1217.

27. Albert Wohlstetter, "Is There a Strategic Arms Race?"
Foreign Policy, No. 15, Summer 1974, pp. 3-20; and Wohlstetter,
"Rivals, But No 'Race'," Foreign Policy, No. 16, Fall 1974, pp. 48-
81.

28. Wohlstetter, "Is There a Strategic Arms Race?" p. 3.

29. Michael L. Nacht, "The Delicate Balance of Error," Foreign
Policy, No. 19, Summer 1975, pp. 163-77.

30. Henry S. Rowen, "Introduction," in Henry Sokolski,
ed.. Getting A/LAD: Nuclear Mutual Assure Destruction, Its
Origins and Practice, Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute,
November 2004, p. 3, available from www.npec-weh.org/Books.
asp?BookID=2n6845428.

31. Albert Wohlstetter, The Delicate Balance of Terror (un-
abridged version), P-1472, Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation,
November 6, 1958, Revised December 1958, p. 17, available from

www.rand.org/about/history/wohlstetter/P1472/P1472.html.

32. Wohlstetter, The Delicate Balance of Terror, p. 18.

33. Henry Sokolski has called my attention to a press release
issued about a week after the report was released saying that "it
would be unwise to rely on denaturing to insure an interval of as
much as a year." See Press Release No. 235 [on the Secretary of
State's Committee on Atomic Energy's Report on the International

121

Control of Atomic Energy, Washington, DC: U.S. Government
Printing Office, March 16, 1946], U.S. Department of State, April
9, 1946.

34. An important vehicle for addressing this and other security
issues was Discriminate Deterrence, final report of the Commission
on an Integrated Long Term Strategy, Washington, DC: U.S.
Government Printing Office, January 1988, www.alhertwohlstetter.
com/writings/Descriminate Deterrence. Co-chaired by AW and
Fred Ikle, the Commission was made up of a distinguished set of
members appointed jointly by the Secretary of Defense and the
President's National Security Advisor.

35. National Conference of Catholic Bishops, The Challenge of
Peace: God's Promise and Our Response, a pastoral letter on war and
peace, Washington, DC: Office of Publication Services of the U.S.
Catholic Conference, May 3, 1983.

36. Albert Wohlstetter, "Bishops, Statesmen, and Other
Strategists on the Bombing of Innocents," Commentary, Vol. 75,
No. 6, June 1983, p. 15.

37. Ihid.

38. Ihid, p. 16.

39. "Background Briefing on Targeting," news transcript,
U.S. Department of Defense, March 5, 2003, available from www.
defenselink.mil/transcripts/transcript.aspx? transcriptid=2007.

40. See "Targeting and Collateral Damage," presentation
slides. Central Command, U.S. Department of Defense, March
5, 2003, slide 4, available from www.defenselink.mil/news/Briefing
Slide.aspx?Briefing SlideID=90.

41. Jay Winik, On the Brink: The Dramatic, Behind-the-Scenes
Saga of the Reagan Era and the Men and Women Who Won the Cold
War, New York, NY: Simon and Shuster, 1996, p. 50. Quoted by
Rhodes, Arsenals of Folly, p. 111.

122

Theory and Opposed-Systems Design (1968)

Albert Wohlstetter

D(L)-16001-1, Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation,
August 1967, revised January 1968, available from

www. rand.org/about/history/wohlstetter/DLl 6001.1/
DLieOOl.l.html. Courtesy of the Wohlstetter Estate.

I. Madness in Methodology?

When, after nearly a decade of study and work in the
field, 1 left mathematical logic and the logic of science, 1 made
a resolution not to write papers on the methodology or logic of
social science — for fear 1 would never learn any social science. It
was all too easy at the time to publish applications of Boolean
algebra or the calculus of relations or the like that could just
conceivably be relevant to some future empirical study, in, say,
economics. But 1 had the uneasy feeling that in offering guides
for new approaches to social science, 1 might never approach very
closely myself. And 1 did want to learn something of the facts of life
and the substantive issues whose powerful interest had dragged
me away from the more chaste attractions of logic. 1 also had an
uncomfortable suspicion that the devastating remark of the great
French mathematician, Henri Poincare, about sociology ("The
most methods, and the least results") might only too accurately
describe the way one might dally in the approach to any social
science in order to avoid actually going in and getting lost in a
very dense jungle. Maps, brochures, the purchase of compasses,
machetes, bush jackets, and rakish tropical helmets can be used as
a substitute for a hot and sweaty journey. In short, 1 sympathize
with Johan Galtung's misgivings about theories about theory in
a theory-poor field. (And with the feeling expressed by Burton
Marshall since 1 first wrote these lines: reading the behavioralist
literature in international relations seems a bit like sitting through
an overture that never ends.^ But 1 find that traditionalist critiques
of behavioral essays on methodology, with rare exceptions like
Marshall's own laconic contributions, have their own longeurs.)

Nonetheless, 1 find myself on the point of talking about an
approach, and supposedly a distinctive approach, to the study of
international relations — a notoriously impenetrable jungle. One
customary way to begin such a discussion is to tick off all the

123

other approaches, the wrong ones, and to end up with a shiny,
colored brochure describing the right one — that sole hope for
social science, your own. That is not the plan of this paper (though
flesh being what it is, it might, of course, turn out that way).

The sort of study that has mainly engaged me for the last
sixteen years has been pragmatic in purpose. Yet it seems to me
that, from time to time, it has displayed traits of the relations
among nations that are interesting and even important for theory.
It has at any rate involved the extensive use of theory. That is
to say, it has used mathematical models in "essentially general"
form, models that refer to potential operations among states or
other elements in the international system in a way that cannot
be reduced merely to elementary statements about individual
objects or to a finite conjunction of such singular statements.^ It
has also involved a great deal of grubby, highly specific empirical
work on technologies, operations, costs, and potential interactions
among states, factors that are plainly relevant for decisions of
the governments of these states — or for citizens evaluating these
decisions. It has required the cooperation of several disciplines
and, in particular, a kind of close working together of natural
science and social science disciplines which remains very unusual,
if it exists at all, in universities. Hence, "a new approach."

On the other hand, it is quite clear to me that this line of
attack hardly exhausts the approaches to the investigation of
the relations among states or even the good approaches. And its
novelties do not mean a total discontinuity with other ways of
looking at the subject. I believe, in fact, that for all the obvious
differences in its quantitative form from the classical or traditional
writings in the field, with a bit of stretching of both, the approach
I shall call "opposed-systems design" can be accommodated
within the classical tradition quite as easily as within the more
recent behavioral studies. It has indeed dealt with some matters
at the heart of traditional international relations theory — namely,
power relations among states — in a particularly operational and
concrete way. Much behavioral theory does not. It differs from
classical theory in subject as well as method.

Declaring yourself neutral in the war between the classicists
and the behavioralists is probably about as safe as claiming
neutrality between General Cao Ky and the Buddhists in Vietnam,
and as little convincing to either side. Nonetheless, it is true
that I have a high regard for a good many traditional studies of
international relations— so far, for rather more of them perhaps

124

than for the new studies. At the same time, I believe that some
numerical relations are essential in understanding the changing
relations among states; that they are frequently implicit in at
least rudimentary form in the classical works and could stand
more rigorous statement, imaginative extension, and systematic
confirmation or disconfirmation by evidence. And I suspect that
the specific quantitative methods that engage behavioralists
today include some of those that might suggest fruitful theory.
The current practices of traditional and behavioral studies do not
exclude each other, nor do they together — or even in combination
with the approach I shall describe — exhaust the possibilities. It is
very easy to find miserable examples of any method, including,
I would stress, the one I shall describe. There are no methods
certain of result in a complex field of research. None is proof
against a dim awareness of interesting problems or incompetence
in formulating manageable and significant questions. The truth
is that international studies are a hard line of work. The useful
inquiries in international affairs that contrast in method, in good
part, seem to me to complement each other, but to focus on
different questions.

My purpose in this paper will be to describe the sort of study I
have been concerned with, and then to try to locate it very briefly
with respect to other studies in the field, some traditional and some
(to use once again the current jargon) behavioral. The precision
with which I can locate the method of opposed-systems design is
limited by the fact that, while I have been actively concerned for
quite a few years in the field of international affairs, I can claim
no encyclopedic understanding of the literature. In any case the
comparisons, as I have already suggested, are not invidious but
orienting.

II. Opposed Systems

A. Questions for Decision-Makers

I shall use the phrase "opposed-systems design" to name
a kind of study that attempts to discern and answer questions
affecting policy— specifically affecting a choice of ends and of
means to accomplish ends that stand a good chance of being
opposed by other governments. The ends of any government
are multiple and only partially incompatible with those of other
governments — even very hostile ones — and of course such

125

conflicts may be resolved without fighting. A peaceful resolution
may depend in part on the risks involved in combat. In any case
the conflict of aims raises the possibility of combat: and a major
part of these studies is concerned therefore with the likelihood
and the likely outcomes of such combat. In fact, they grew out of
operational research as it had been practiced in World War II.

The positive reasons for my choice of this label will be
made clear in what follows. On the negative side, "opposed-
systems design" replaces several synonyms — some of my own
devising — which have not quite succeeded in fending off casual
misunderstanding. One workable synonym might appear to be
"strategic studies"; but the phrase is at best ambiguous and at
worst a militantly indiscriminate epithet used by antagonists of
any study of potential military conflict. The most familiar serious
candidate is E. L. Paxson's "systems analysis" and, in fact, this has
the largest currency; there is now, for example, an able Assistant
Secretary of Defense for Systems Analysis. But the word "system"
is everybody's possession. It is used rather differently by engineers
in "systems engineering," by theorists of international relations,
and in particular by Mr. Kaplan in his "systems theory," and,
rather mysteriously, by the general semanticists in their "general
systems theory." As a short name for a complex of interdependent
elements, the word "system" seems nearly indispensable, but not
specific enough. Yet it is used without qualification to designate
very different kinds of complexes of interdependent elements.
I have tried in the past to discriminate the sort of study Paxson
had in mind from many of these others by talking of "conflict-
systems design," but that has the difficulty of suggesting that the
goal of study is to generate conflict. "Conflict-worthy systems,"
modeled on "sea-worthy," is a more accurate term but even more
awkward. Perhaps "opposed-systems design" is closing in on it.
Potential opposition at any rate is an essential.

In both England and the United States during World War
II, as is well known, a considerable and very fruitful effort was
devoted to operational research, to the systematic analysis of
alternative ways of accomplishing various proximate objectives.
These analyses aided decisions on how to deploy and operate
radars and coordinate them with interceptors in the Battle of
Britain, how to pattern the movements of destroyers searching for
submarines in the Bay of Biscay, how to determine the optimum
altitudes for penetration and bomb delivery in the European
theater, and a host of other matters. Studies of similar scope and

126

intent continue today and are applied to aid or implement the
decisions not only of national organizations but also of alliance
and international (including interadversary) organizations.
Among the latter studies are analyses of the instruments and
sampling inspection procedures for an underground test ban or to
prevent the diversion of material or equipment from peaceful to
nonpeaceful uses in nuclear reactors operated under international
agreements.

Present as well as past operational research had to do with
how best to operate with given organizations and specified
equipment in order to achieve various near-term goals. The
operations studied have been essentially tactical. After World War
II, however, broader analyses to aid decisions were made, dealing
with a longer run in which a wider range of alternatives could be
made available. New equipment could be designed, developed,
and purchased, organizations could be expanded or contracted,
and more numerous uncertainties were likely to affect the
environment in which they operated and the goals they worked to
achieve. Such cardinal choices, to borrow a term from C. P. Snow,
might be illustrated by the decision on how to allocate resources
for a strategic force that would not be operational until some years
hence and that one might expect to constitute a major part of the
operational force for the better part of the following decade. How
much should one spend on increasing the size of this force and
how much on protecting it and making it more subject to control?
This specific choice was a vital one in developing a second-strike
capability and in clarifying the objective of deterrence. Another
question presently much debated, especially in connection
with the decision on ballistic missile defense, concerns resource
allocation between offense and active and passive defense. In an
international environment that includes five countries that have
made nuclear explosions and over one hundred and thirty that
have not, still another cardinal issue today concerns the choice
of military stance, formal or informal alliance commitments, and
practicable international treaty arrangements among adversaries
that may best reduce the expectation of nuclear war and the
damage it would do. Such larger studies contrast with operational
research mainly in degree, in the number of factors considered,
and in the time perspective. In fact, they normally incorporate
many operational research studies as components. They may
be said to consider the larger "strategic" alternatives as distinct
from the smaller "tactical" choices made in operational research.

127

provided "strategy" is understood broadly enough to include a
choice of ends as well as means.

All such studies, whether in the large or in the small, concern
alternative systems involving both items of equipment and
organizations of men using them. In this respect they are like
the systems engineering studies of large complex systems in the
public utility field, such as telephony, transportation, or postal
systems. But in a public utility like the Bell Telephone system
or the Japanese Super Hikari express train system, the principal
obstacles to be overcome are natural ones: difficult terrain, storms,
earthquakes, atmospheric disturbances, etc., with direct human
opposition, such as sabotage, forming only a minor concern. In
the field of arms and arms control both the peacetime and wartime
decisions that will affect the safety and power relations among
states must all be taken with potential man-made obstacles in
mind; their success in good part depends on other decisions that
may be taken by an at least partially hostile government.

B. Theoretical Models

In elaborating an analysis of the capabilities in the 1950s of
either of the two major nuclear powers for striking back after
nuclear attack on its strategic force, or in analyzing the feasibility
and cost in the 1970s for one of the two major powers to limit
potential damage by using active defenses against an initial
ballistic missile attack, mathematical models embodying a
theory of these interactions are necessary. Sometimes large-scale
computer models are required. Sometimes a small analytic model
will catch essential features of the subject matter. A study of the
protection of strategic forces in the early 1950s^ used differential
equation models capable of analytic solution on a slide rule, as well
as Monte Carlo computer models for some component studies.
Optimal solutions found by partial differentiation required fixing
in advance the values of a great many variables (numbers of
targets struck, the number of vehicles forming a "cell" to saturate
defenses, the number of warheads, the number of kilograms per
warhead, the overpressure resistance of elements on bases and
their dispersal in space, deployment and delay times in the active
defenses, approach and penetration routes and altitude profiles,
and peacetime costs that varied for alternative readiness choices
among others). Though some simple analytic models have been
useful, their realism and utility have depended on their being

128

associated with a painstaking empirical examination of variations
much too complex to be represented by a well-behaved analytic
function or a smooth curve. For example, the losses to be expected
by aircraft penetrating distant defenses and many other costs
that vary with distance are seldom essentially continuous or
linear or monotonic-increasing. They may not even be steadily
nondecreasing. Nor are they derivable from common experience.

It is worth observing that, contrary to current legend, opposed-
systems analyses have made little or no use of game theory, and
while they normally require many map exercises, they have
not been heavily dependent on formal games or experimental
simulation. I would guess that games and game theory have
played a much smaller role in serious studies whose main aim
is to aid specific decisions on opposed systems than they do in
the more general academic behavioral literature on international
conflict appearing in such magazines as the Journal of Conflict
Resolution.

In the more successful studies, mathematical models of
potential military interaction have played a rather pragmatic
role, but they are essential. On the other hand, so is a great deal
of elementary arithmetic; and much study of data derived from
state-of-the-arts studies, theoretical analyses of equipment design,
tests of existing equipment and components of future equipment,
peacetime operations and logistics; and also political data
permitting at least rough judgments of such contingencies as the
loss of various overseas base areas. (Political catastrophes such as
the loss of bases may affect aircraft and tanker requirements quite
as much as technological factors like specific fuel consumption.)
Since the choices to be affected extend years into the future, the
alternatives compared and studied empirically may include not
simply the received or existing alternatives but also invented
ones. The invention of operations, organizations, or equipment
has, in fact, been crucial in the studies that have worked out best.

C. The Time Span Covered

These theories and the policies they serve deal with a future
that is long compared to the models and choices in traditional
operational research, which aims at proximate goals for forces
substantially fixed in size and composition. On the other hand,
their scope in time has been modest by comparison with that
of attempts to construct theories of international strategy, as in

129

Schelling, or systems theories, as in Kaplan, or theories of the
balance of power like Deutsch and Singer's highly general semi-
quantitative construct; or many of the more traditional, less
explicitly quantitative theories. The sort of opposed-systems
design of which I speak studies technologies, operations, political
interactions, and economic costs stretching perhaps for as much
as a decade and a half into the future, and designs alternative
systems to operate within that period, which has seemed to be
about as far in advance as the technological and political context
can be foreseen or parameterized with enough constraints to yield
conclusions. In fact, though hope and salesmanship may spring
eternal for eternal final solutions to our troubles, the best practice
is quite self-conscious about the finiteness of the life of measures
proposed, and will estimate their end. Thus, at the beginning of
the 1950s, it was possible to design a system of deterrence for
the rest of the decade in the United States, which used tactical
warning to permit alert response as an essential part of a complex
set of arrangements. But by the time the system was designed
and some of its elements adopted in principle, while it had seven
years or so to run, it was also foreseen by the designers that travel
times for attacking vehicles in the early 1960s would be so sharply
reduced that warning and alert measures, while still useful, would
no longer have a decisive importance. They would not, at any
rate, be adequate. Measures that did not depend on warning and
fast response, such as shelter for strategic vehicles or a mode of
operation which kept vehicles on the move, would be an essential
both for survival under attack and for reducing the likelihood of a
fast and irrevocable response to a false alarm. At the start of 1954,
a second study which designed a deterrent system for the 1960s
suggested the methods of hardening that were later adopted, but
explicitly anticipated that the adequacy of such measures would
not outlast the 1960s, when guidance technology could be expected
to reduce the inaccuracy exploited by protective construction.*
(The first sketch of the study was entitled "Defending a Strategic
Force After 1960" and had a subsection entitled "After After 1960"
which dealt with technological changes likely in the 1970s. ^) In
both studies, estimates of the length of time at the end of which
the design measures would no longer suffice turned out to be
quite accurate. It is interesting to observe that ambitious smaller
powers developing nuclear forces have chugged along, ten years
out of phase, just in time to develop first- and second-generation
forces capable of meeting the past but not the contemporaneous
threat.

130

The perspective of ten or fifteen years or so may not be an
essential permanent feature of such opposed-systems design
and analysis. But neither is it accidental. It has been connected
with the fact that some of the major technological changes take
that long to come into effect, once they are visible. It has taken
about that long for some of the potentially decisive changes in the
state of the art to go from the stage of well confirmed principle
through research, development, engineering, and procurement
to operation on a considerable scale. After that they are likely
to remain in operation for some time. In the summer of 1953,
for example, Bruno Augenstein and (a while later) the Gardner
Committee perceived the implications of high-yield, relatively
small, light fusion payloads for transforming the performance
of the intercontinental ballistic missile program then under
desultory development for over a half a dozen years. However,
even the crash program that resulted, and many billions of
dollars, could not advance the time to a date earlier than the
1960s, at which ballistic missiles would make up the bulk of the
force of the two major powers. It was possible in 1951 and 1952 to
recognize that vehicles travelling at ballistic speeds might appear
in the force in the sixties decade; and by 1953 to recognize they
would be; and in both cases to take such impending changes into
account in designing systems of deterrence. Years before forces
are in operation, it is possible to analyze their interactions with
some success, and frequently also to recognize the time limits in
which the analysis is valid. It is not solely, of course, a matter of
the technological state of the art. Some of the conditions of the
analysis will also concern the rate of change at which political
arrangements may take place. So at the start of the 1950s, with
base rights in two dozen or more countries, one could safely
assume that while some rights would be withdrawn, not all nor,
in fact, most of these rights would be lost by the end of the decade.
One could, moreover, test alternative base systems for how they
would fare under a variety of reasonably likely contingencies;
but, beyond a decade, the variety of possibilities multiplies very
fast.

I would not exclude the possibility of dealing with longer-run
futures. Indeed, some sorts of gross technological and political
change may be visible in outline decades off and yet require so
long an incubation period that they need some actions now to
bring them into being or to prevent some desirable futures from
being foreclosed. Even designs for Bell Telephone must sometimes
be planned on a time scale involving decades. Changes in urban

131

development and population concentrations are extremely slow,
and some of the time constants in urban and regional design need
also to be quite long. It is apparent that some major features of
the international environment will change only over a period of
decades, and, while attempts at increasing safety must be open to
the wide variety of contingencies implied by such a scale, some
gross limitations on this variety may be decipherable. There
are a number of attempts now current to look at such long-run
futures, or proposals to do so (Bertrand de Jouvenel's Futuribles;
the Commission for the Year 2000 of the American Academy of
Arts and Sciences; the Hudson Institute Project on the Year 2000;
the Institute for 21st Century Studies at Ball State University in
Muncie, Indiana; Olaf Helmer's projected Institute for the Future;
and many others) and such activity may yield useful guides for
designing systems for very long-term changes in international
affairs. However, for the time, the empirical success of such
studies of the long-run future lies in the future; we may hope in a
shorter-run future.

The upshot of the foregoing is that, at best, the theories
developed so far in opposed-systems design cover a self-
consciously restricted interval of time in which the critical,
potential, dynamic interactions are mainly contained within the
span of less than a decade and a half, sometimes considerably
less.

D. Means

What I have said already makes clear that an opposed-systems
design deals with a complex variety of means and conditions
including various technologies, modes of operation, organizations,
and economic and political factors. Most important, such factors
have to be dealt with simultaneously, since there is a great deal
of feedback. Take the critical role of technology, for example. If
you look at economic treatises you will find statements like "We
assume as given the maximum amount of output x, which can be
produced from any given set of inputs (v^ ... v^ ). This catalogue
of possibilities is the production function and may be written
x = T(vi... v„)".

For an opposed-systems design a procedure of taking the
technical coefficients as fixed or as undetermined parameters will
not do. A central part of the inquiry must look at the current and
impending state of the art and at feasible and useful changes.
In the past two decades in which such inquiries have grown

132

up, nuclear, electronic, propulsion, and transport technology
have changed massively. The problem is not just to predict such
changes, however. Since this is a work of design, it must explore
how — in the light of interdependences with military, political,
and economic events — the changes may usefully be bent.

Technology with its enormous changes presents not only
essential problems for the analysis, but also some of the major
distinctive opportunities for such an analysis. For, along with the
uncertainties, a system with a large technological component,
like the highly organized warning, command, control, com-
munication, and reaction systems of aircraft and missiles,
inevitably displays many regularities and predictabilities, and
the changed relationships brought about by order-of-magnitude
increases in a critical technical variable will also be accessible to
theoretical analysis. (Thus changes of three orders of magnitude
in the explosive yield of a given volume and weight of payload,
and by an order of magnitude in the speed of vehicles, or by an
order of magnitude in delivery accuracy, can be expected to have
decisive and analyzable effects on the economic and operational
variables.)

Analyses of opposed systems have worked out best where
the technical component has been large and where, as a result,
the problem of predicting the outcome of operational interactions
has been more manageable. (Yet not without its surprises: some
of the greatest successes have come where large changes in the
technical components impend, but the ramified consequences of
these changes are obvious only after an analysis of considerable
sophistication.) Analyses have worked least well where the
systems analyzed have been determined by minutely varied local
characteristics, such as terrain, morale, training, etc., with no gross
technical components dominating the result. Operational analyses
of the interaction of ground forces are seldom convincing for this
reason, except where there are many obvious disproportions
between the components of strength of opposing sides. The
formal models they employ — usually some simple differential
equations of a type introduced by F. W. Lanchester near the start
of World War P — have not often provided very persuasive or
useful representations of these highly variable, locally determined
phenomena. In their simplest form, Lanchester' s equations
state that the rate of change or dissipation in a military force is
proportional to the absolute size of the opposing military force.
The constant of proportionality in this negative term represents

133

the rate of destruction that can be brought about by a unit of the
opposing military force.

dt ^

Partly, perhaps, because these equations have a simple analytic
solution, a vast literature has grown up elaborating them and
applying them to a very wide variety of cases/

There are some actual cases which approximate these
equations. In this respect there is quite as much to say for them as
for Richardson's formally similar equations, now rather popular
for representing arms races. In fact, some rather better fits
have been found for the Lanchester equations.^ But they do not
represent a universal law governing all combat. And Lanchester
himself was aware of situations in which they did not apply at
all. They have not been much help in predicting the outcomes of
classical war between large armies.

Judging the outcome of potential classical combat is a
problem not simply for analysts, of course, but for decision-
makers, too. The Israelis, for example, feel themselves menaced
in a world in which their hostile neighbors outnumber them
by a factor of twenty-five. They regard their own superiority in
morale, training, education, and technical skill as making up for
some of this numerical difference in population and even in the
number of tanks and other equipment, but have made clear that
there are some changes in Arab military equipment and even
some political changes that they will not tolerate. They believe
that such changes would presage a successful Arab attack. But
how does one estimate the outcome of such complex interactions
in which so many of the variables that influence the result are
hard to measure?

Just before the Suez campaign of 1956, Czech and Russian
arms arrangements with Egypt drastically increased Egyptian
superiority in tanks and jet aircraft to a ratio of four to one.
According to General Dayan, "In artillery, naval vessels and
infantry weapons, the Israel picture was no better. It was not
only the disparity in quantity but also the superiority in quality
which decisively upset the arms scales."' A maxim attributed to
Napoleon is that the moral is to the material as four is to one. It is,
however, difficult to establish a unit of moral, and it is therefore

134

rather hard to know how to trade it against jet aircraft and tanks.
In any case, the Israelis decided not to wait until the increase in
Egyptian armaments had become operationally effective. Again
in 1967, on the basis of published figures,^" it appears that the
Egyptians had about 430 combat aircraft, not counting jet trainers,
and the Israelis had about 200, not counting their 60 Magister
Fouga trainers. There were large discrepancies in other arms,
and if one counted in the Iraqi, Syrian, and Jordanian air forces
(these countries had all joined Nasser in the week preceding the
outbreak), the odds looked again to be close to four to one. Such
gross order-of-battle figures are hard to interpret. And in 1967
it is clear that the Israelis and the Egyptians interpreted them
differently. Intuition had to serve. But it did not serve the two
sides equally.

Intuition plays a role in all theorizing, too, but in a successful
systems analysis the theory can do a good deal to support and
sharpen and sometimes correct intuition. The Israelis have
recently, along with the Swedes and some other of the smaller
powers, done a good deal to develop systems analysis and
opposed-systems design. But it appears so far that their analytic
successes, like those of the NATO countries, have been not as
much in large-scale ground war as in very small unit interaction
and in the more technologically determined areas, such as those
involving aircraft. Air war was Lanchester's starting point a half-
century ago, even though he applied it more broadly. So far I
know of no convincing opposed-systems analysis in the large (i.e.,
strategy) of warfare between large armies.

The growing importance of technology and the gross changes
in performance effected by new states of the art assure an increas-
ing range of application for the sorts of theory used in opposed-
systems design. It is a paradox that we can do better in analyzing
the potential outcomes of some sorts of conflict that have never
occurred than we can do with conflicts of the sort that have been
endemic for ages. This does not mean, of course, that the new
sorts of conflicts would not have their surprises. It remains true
that anticipating the course and result of a war between armies of
men with variable intensities of political motivation and skill on
terrain whose multiple surface deformations strongly influence
outcomes of separate local engagements over a period of weeks,
months, or even years is extraordinarily hard — except possibly
for cases where an opponent grossly outclasses the other in all
relevant respects. And, by comparison, one can with relative ease
predict the consequence of 50 or 100 fusion-tipped intermediate

135

range ballistic missiles with known accuracies and yields
exploding on ten or so aircraft bases containing vehicles without
benefit of tactical warning or blast protection. A relatively few
measurable variables determine the outcome. This "easy" analysis,
however, is not trivial. It has substantial contemporary relevance,
for example, to an estimate of the second-strike capability of the
first-generation French nuclear force based on some ten points in
south and southwestern France. Against a small force of Russian
rockets used appropriately, it has no significant probability of
survival. Slightly more complicated analyses of their second-
generation force yield similar results. Neither the Mirage IV
bomber force nor the hardened missile force in Haute Provence
which will succeed it could survive an attack from the more
advanced contemporary forces whose threat they are supposed
to deter. Such an analysis would be reinforced by considerations
of the problem of protecting centers of command and the flow of
information to and from them; and of the cumulative obstacles
that can be interposed inside the territory of a major antagonist.
Uncertainties qualify all empirical analyses, but in these cases
they are much reduced, so gross are the determinants of the
cumulative interactions. Rather more complex but quite reliable
analyses can be made of the third-generation French force. These
analyses of the military performance do not say all there is to say
about the force defrappe, or the broader questions of incentives and
drawbacks to the spread of nuclear weapons, but they say some
things of great importance. ^^

Finally, though the regularities introduced by technology have
played an important and even a critical role in opposed-systems
design, such analyses nonetheless are not purely technological,
though some technologists are in the habit of saying so. There are
essential interactions and feedbacks, as I have already said, with
operational, economic, and political events.

E. Ends

One of the disabilities of the phrase "strategic studies" as a
description or title of the opposed-systems analyses that have
grown up since World War II is that at least some of the dictionary
definitions of "strategy" limit the word to the study of alternative
means to attain fixed ends. These wide-ranging studies, looking
ahead for many years, differ from operational research by taking
as a salient objective the clarification and revision of the objectives
maximized. ^^ This point is worth stressing not simply because of

136

the possible misleading associations with the word "strategy," but
because of some current semi-comic misunderstandings on the
subject. Unlike operational research on tactics, opposed-systems
design of major alternatives tends where it is successful to involve
a careful critique of constraints and objectives. A government's
ends cannot be accepted as the final deliverances of authority or
intuition. They are subject to revision as the result of an analysis
that frequently displays incompatibilities with other ends of that
government, or that indicates means so costly that the game is
not worth the candle. Moreover, even when an opposed-systems
design does not set out to revise objectives, it is quite likely to end
up that way."

The tentative character of the objectives examined in an
opposed-systems design and the importance of questioning ends
as well as means are not merely minor qualifications in a general
practice of finding the best means to fixed, unquestionable ends.
They are major points of difference from operational research,
stressed from the start by the principal practitioners of opposed-
systems design. The need to take objectives only on trial is imposed,
in the case of actual research on broad policy issues extending over
years, by the very breadth of the inquiry. There is no authoritative
or intuitive set of goals perfectly compatible with each other and
with content enough to furnish guidance. In fact, there is always
a multiplicity of goals in partial conflict. Political circumstances
and technologies alter, making the old goals partially irrelevant
and sometimes offering opportunities to satisfy several desired
objectives simultaneously that had been previously incompatible,
or vice versa. The well-defined preference function establishing
at least a weak ordering among all possible alternatives, which
is a convenient assumption in much of economic theory, is never
realized in fact even for individuals, much less for nations. "All
possible alternatives" are not in general definable and not all of the
possibilities we might specify are strictly speaking "connected,"
subject to a weak order: there are some complex pairs of
alternatives we don't know how to compare, how to establish one
member of the pair as no worse than the other. While there are, of
course, some -partial orders among our preferences, frequently we
learn how to compare them only in the process of an analysis.^*

Of course, a government agency seeking aid in its decisions
may have quite firm ideas to start with as to what it wants to
accomplish by a specific decision and may hope for succor only in
the choice of means. Nonetheless, precisely because governments
have limited resources and more than one objective, there is

137

always the possibility that the initial objective will be bought at
too great a sacrifice of other goals. And, from the standpoint of
the sponsoring agency itself, one critical advantage of objective
research on policy is that it can aid decision to avoid irrational
sacrifice of important goals by pointing to the need for revising
ends. Moreover, in governments such as that of the United
States, questioning goals need not be terribly dangerous to the
questioner; there are always enough factions espousing varied
ends to provide some safety in dealing with a short-sighted or
dogmatic leadership.

One may ask, however, whether there are not limits in the
method of opposed-systems analysis which prevent the question-
ing of some objectives. Isn't it tied to the "power structure"^' —
whatever mist that hazy phrase designates? If the conclusion of
a systems analysis were to propose the overthrow by force of
a government sponsoring it, it would be rather unreasonable
to suppose that the sponsor would be overjoyed: "Yes, indeed,
the analysis has not met my original objectives, but it has hit on
something more important: my violent overthrow." Or, "It has
met my original objectives, and even better, it involves my violent
overthrow." But few foreign-policy objectives of government
in the United States seem to be so fundamentally at odds with
the realities that they require overthrow of our government for
their accomplishment; and if they are, this is hardly a limitation
characteristic of the method of analysis. Let me expand on this a
little.

So far we have talked about governments and nations. Most
of the problems normally considered in international relations
have to do with the relations among states. This is, to be sure,
somewhat artificial — an approximation useful for some purposes,
like the treatment of stars as point-masses in astronomy. However,
the internal structure of states may critically affect conflict or
cooperation among states, the start or ending of wars, and many
other matters. Specific peace terms may look less tolerable to the
ruling faction than continuing to fight; concluding the war may
then require dealing with a faction previously not in control.
Dealings with governments to end World Wars I and II provide
several examples. An analytic understanding of alternatives in
civil wars is of interest, therefore, to the international theorist as
well as to the decision-maker.^*

I refer to the decision-maker both in and out of the government.
There is no reason why a revolutionary might not find it handy
to use the tools of opposed-systems design himself. Mao, Giap,

138

Guevara, and many others have worked out theories of how
best to overthrow some sorts of government, complete with
suggestions as to the technical equipment for conducting guerrilla
war as well as the political devices that seem to have worked out
best. A careful reading of their manuals suggests they might use a
more tentative and systematic self -correcting mode of theorizing
themselves, and there is nothing in the character of opposed-
systems design that gives capitalist governments a patent which
cannot be infringed. Though revolutionaries normally require
rather rigid adherence to their programs, it should be observed,
of course, that the ends of revolutionaries are multiple and often
turn out to be in conflict, too, and therefore cannot safely be
regarded as final. A good opposed-systems design to bring about
a revolution would not be too rigidly tied to the unanalyzed goals
of the revolutionary power structure.

F. Uncertainties, Simplifications, and the Role of Inequalities

Statements about new approaches tend to be both pro-
grammatic and excessively hopeful. I believe there have been
some successes in the analysis and design of opposed systems.
But I have tried to suggest, as I have gone along, some of their
limits. In fact, very large uncertainties affect both the ends and the
means dealt with in an opposed-systems analysis; and the models
used, while solving some problems, introduce others. Inevitably
they simplify, and therefore introduce error. Simplification
is a problem for all theory. I can say just a little about both the
uncertainties and about how opposed-systems design has dealt
with them and with the biases of theoretical simplification.^^

First, on the uncertainties. The long period between the
gestation of a technology and its birth, operational life, and death
has a double aspect, so far as uncertainty is concerned. It means
that the system as originally conceived will have to face a great
many eventualities that were unlikely to have been foreseen at the
time of conception. On the other hand, it confers some element of
stability and predictability that can be used in an analysis.

The B-36 took some seventeen years from the idea of it to
the time at which it was phased out of the strategic force. It was
conceived shortly after the fall of France as insurance against the
contingency that Britain might fall, too. Its proponents thought of
it as a way of reaching Germany with high explosives from bases
at intercontinental distances, if no bases nearby were available.
It was at the beginning a propeller plane, designed to operate

139

against defenses consisting of guns and propeller-driven fighter
planes. Its designers did not consider the opposition of surface-
to-air missiles or jets and knew nothing of the Manhattan Project
which was shortly to develop nuclear explosives. In fact, they
learned of the Manhattan Project only when most of us did, with
the explosion at Hiroshima. By the time the B-36 was phased into
the force, after many vicissitudes, it had four jet engines as well as
six propeller engines. It was expected to carry a nuclear payload
over quite different routes to quite different targets against a
different enemy with markedly different active defenses, and an
offense that might make even bases at intercontinental distances
unsafe.^* The history of tactical fighter planes seems even more
regularly to display disparities between initial conception and
actual operating conditions. This can be illustrated by the story of
the P-47 Thunderbolt and the P-51 Mustang in World War II."

Such large and ineradicable uncertainties present problems
in plenty for analysts, but even more for dogmatists. And large
bureaucracies teem with dogmatists. Of necessity most of the
bureaucracy will be engaged in the complexities of day-to-day
decision of the sort that keeps a bureaucracy afloat. Intelligence
tends to be expended in the short run, while frequently very large
changes are gathering and — to the persistent eye — are already
visible just beyond the short run. The familiar trait of inertia
that characterizes large and complex organizations confers an
especially great marginal productivity on realistic analysis of the
basic changes impending and their significance. New technologies
involving dramatic order-of-magnitude improvements take a
considerable time to become operational realities; this fact limits
the range of uncertainty, making it possible to look ahead. The char-
acteristics of decision-making in large organizations frequently
insure that, without a systematic effort at analyzing the distant
consequences of coming changes, programs will be obsolete by
the time they come into effect. Inventive and realistic systems
design has been useful not so much because it is intrinsically so
good as because the alternative of routine decision is so bad.

The strategy for dealing with uncertainty is related also
to the method of treating the biases introduced by theoretical
simplification. The equations of the physical sciences typically
simplify: they hold only under ideal conditions. However, in
contrast to the empirical associations found in most quantitative
social science inquiries, inequalities or differences between
predicted and actual values can frequently be explained (by the
physical scientist) as due to deviations of the experiment from the

140

ideal conditions assumed in theory. Differences or inequalities, as
distinct from equations, have played another role, but a crucial
one, in opposed-systems analyses. This role has to do with the
prominence of arguments of an a fortiori sort, running "even if . . .;
then more so, since in fact...." In comparing alternative systems
with one programmed, one cannot eliminate uncertainty, but
one can assume that they will be resolved favorably from the
standpoint of a dubious programmed system. One cannot avoid
theoretical simplification, but one can design a model to favor
the programmed or other losing systems and to give them the
benefit of the doubt. Then if the comparison shows that, even with
all the favors bestowed by the model's assumption, the system
programmed or otherwise likely to be chosen is vastly inferior to
an alternative, this offers substantial ground for choice. Moreover,
it should not be surprising that bureaucrats exhibit enough inertia
to make such a fortiori analyses possible and very useful, as some
opposed-systems analyses have been.

III. Links to Other Theories in International Relations

A. Theories of Decision in International Affairs

Opposed-systems designs have looked at the choices avail-
able for government decision-makers where such decisions
are interdependent with decisions of other governments. This
concern connects them in an obvious way with theories of
decision-making in international politics of the sort associated
with Richard Snyder, H. W. Bruck, B. Sapin, and J. A. Robinson.
However, not just these scholars but most theorists of international
relations are, in one way or another, concerned with the foreign-
policy decisions of governments, or the decisions of international
organizations. A good many such theorists, including many of the
behavioralists, take decision processes and decision-makers as
their main subject matter: for example, they study how decision-
makers behave in crisis. Indeed, Rosecrance and Mueller, in a
sympathetic and knowledgeable but critical review of academic
quantitative studies of the last decade (those using factor analysis,
content analysis, international simulation, and the measurement
of communication flows) make the point that these studies
cannot be dismissed as they are by the classicists because they
sometimes use rather indirect measures, since the "truly relevant
information" for both the classical and the newer studies would
be data on the processes of government planning and decision

141

and is "scarcely ever available until long after the event. "^^
Rosecrance and Mueller assume, in other words, that the proper
subject matter for study is the decisions themselves — that theory
should be mainly, so to speak, meta-decisional. It seems doubtful
that as much of the focus of inquiry in the traditional literature
has been meta-decisional. On the other hand, an opposed-systems
design will deal with the factors that affect and are the subject of
decision rather than only or mainly the decision process and the
decision-maker. It will deal with such matters as the deployment
of radars, the amount of warning available along various routes
against various attacks and how this might be changed, or
with the number of tons per day that can be lifted to support
a blockaded population, like Berlin's, or with the number of
kilograms of fissile material that might be diverted from peaceful
uses in a nuclear power plant designed to generate electricity,
given specified inspection arrangements under an international
atomic energy authority. It will be concerned with analyzing and
designing methods of control and response in crises. Crises in fact
are likely to be taken as a test of deterrent systems. It will also
look at patterns of behavior of various decision-makers, including
inert and other irrational forms of behavior. But unlike most of
the social-psychological studies with which I am familiar, an
opposed-systems design would be likely to concentrate on the
substantive consequences of the various alternative decisions
that might be taken, and how these consequences might satisfy or
disappoint the multiple ends of the governments concerned.

B. Potential Wars

Opposed-systems analyses have focused on how our national,
alliance or interadversary choices might affect the likelihood and
likely outcomes of various sorts of combat. This focus is clearly
related to a main, historic way of looking at relations among states
at least since Hobbes and Rousseau, who viewed the anarchy of
sovereign independent nations as a state of war — actual fighting
or perpetual anticipation and preparation for it. In the United
States the powerful tradition of realism in international theory has,
of course, shown a large concern with military power relations
among states. But in one way or another almost all approaches to
international affairs must cover this ground en route.

Realist geopolitical theories of the balance of power have been
useful in calling our attention to the interests and aims of nation-
states and the way such interests might be realized or bounded by

142

their relative military strengths. Not only the theoretical essays,
but some of the theoretically-oriented realist historical works —
such as Tang Tsou's monumental study of the American Failure
in China, 1945-51 — heiMe been persuasive and illuminating. But
realist theories are often content to dichotomize interests into
"vital" and "nonvital." For some purposes such gross distinctions
may be serviceable. The functionalists in international law use
this rough division to suggest areas which states will not entrust
to international adjudication and those they might. ^^ Postal
service and cultural exchange seem clearly not vital. However,
for purposes of weighing actions that might lead to war, such a
simple dichotomy is hardly enough. In this connection, as often
as not, a "vital" interest is simply defined as one that a nation
would fight for. This definition has crowned many a tautology
in which, for example, some respected foreign-policy expert
warns Congress that it would be a mistake to suppose that
China would not fight if it felt its vital interests were at stake;
or perhaps reassures Congress that China will not fight unless
its vital interests are at stake — two pieces of wisdom derivable
by definition rather than by long experience as a China hand.
A great many aims of a nation-state may be incompatible with
aims strongly held by other nations or coalitions of nations, and
actions in furthering such aims may risk war. But just how much
they risk war and how much war itself would put at risk can vary
from the insignificant to the catastrophic. Much more explicit
and systematic treatment of goals and interests, and the costs of
fulfilling them, is needed for purposes of policy decision, and is
needed in an opposed-system analysis to aid decision.

Balance-of -power theories have come in for a flood of criticism,
much of it centering on the term "balance. "^^ While the many
ambiguities in the notion of equilibrium used in such theories
are worth pointing out, I do not think that they are very hard to
clarify and correct. A concept of equilibrium and the associated
notions of stability and instability have been useful in social as
well as biological and physical science. Handled with care, they
can be fruitful in theories of international relations. The notion of
"power" itself, which in these contexts has had considerably less
critical scrutiny, is something else again. Even when it is conceived
as military strength, rather than in the broader and vaguer terms
of any capability to "affect" the behavior of others, it bristles with
alternative meanings, and sometimes seems bereft of all. These
lacks sharply limit the uses to which the traditional theories of the
power relations among states can be put.

143

Among traditional theorists even acute critics of balance-of-
power theories implicitly take power as if it were measurable
by a simple arithmetic quantity. In this respect they are like the
objects of their critique. Case studies of the balance of power have
frequently described quite concretely the military forces arrayed
on opposing sides: the numbers of army divisions, tanks, aircraft,
ships of various types, and so on; and also the broad geophysical
setting: oceans, land masses, ranges of mountains, and so on.
However, such specifics are inputs, not outputs of "power,"
which, even though it may be tacitly assumed to be a single
quantity, is undefined. These inputs offer only impressionistic
grounds for judging the outcome of any concrete conflict. But in
international affairs we are interested in the possible outcomes of
a great many conceivable interactions among nations. These vary
from subversion and guerrilla actions, through classic naval or
ground engagements in the homeland of major antagonists or in
some distant theater of war, to the results of nuclear exchanges
under a variety of circumstances of outbreak. A country with few
classical military forces and no nuclear capability might be able
to manipulate covert force effectively. The delivery range and
destructive radius of weapons and the problems of supporting
operations logistically vary for different circumstances and kinds
of conflict, and at various times. No single, one-dimensional
quantity will characterize the range of capabilities usually
intended when we talk of military "power." Strength, in short, is
a vector with many components. It takes a good many numbers
to describe the outcomes that interest us. And systematic analysis
may be needed to project even one.

Just as we can be reasonably sure that postal services don't
engage "vital" interests of sovereign nations in conflict, so some
questions about the relations of force between nation-states are
gross enough to be settled on the basis of the impressions about
air and naval power and oceans and continental land masses. But
a good many others cannot, though they are susceptible to subtler
and more systematic analysis.

On military power relations among states, the behavioral
studies and the quantitative approaches that are usually
contrasted with traditional theories of international relations do
not seem to me to be a decided advance. On power relationships
the empirical work has been slight; the theory has been too
general to be both meaningful and true. Perhaps the slightness is
due to a kind of shunning of the subject. For, as I have suggested,
though behavioralists may contrast their approach with the

144

traditionalists mainly in terms of method, there seem to be
differences in subject matter as well. With a few exceptions, the
empirical quantitative work with which I am familiar has been
concerned with international organization and integration, and
where it has been concerned with conflict, the social-psychological
analyses have dealt with subjects like national and international
images that might create tension, or decision processes in crisis,
or the tendencies of individual decision-makers to distrust the
governments of other countries or to see them as threatening. I
know of little work, however, on the actual military potentialities
of the various states in relation to others and how these might
affect the threats as well as how the threats are perceived.

As for theory, let me take by way of illustration the question
of how military strength varies with distance. I have treated this
at length elsewhere^^ and here can indicate only schematically
the results. Nonetheless, this example may serve to display
some of the characteristic continuities and differences among (1)
traditional theories, (2) the rather general "behavioral" theories,
and (3) opposed-systems analyses of power relations among
states.

(1) In traditional theories of international relations, some
references to distance or proximity and their effects are implicit.
Sometimes they appear in describing the possibility of conflict
itself. The abundance of Rousseau's idyllic state of nature had
something to do with the fact that enough space separated men
to enable them to satisfy their desires without seriously clashing
with each other. And in the much less idyllic condition of anarchy
among the states in Europe, Rousseau's vivid description of their
unstable configuration is made in terms of their close juxtaposition,
touching "each other at so many points that no one of them
can move without giving a deadly jar to all the rest." A casual
survey of classic writings on the anarchy of independent states
turns up a multiplicity of references to problems of equilibrium
of unconnected sovereigns "in the same neighborhood."^^ The
power to do harm has limits in range, and so space would seem to
provide not only more room for satisfying goals without jostling
but also a cushion of safety. Of course, "neighborhood" is a
qualitative term, and it is apparent that vicinities are elastic and
have stretched in several dimensions with time and improvements
in communication, transport, and optimal weapons range. The
qualitative condition assumes only that states are close enough to
have reason for conflict and means to fight each other. However,
not infrequently traditional balance-of -power theories are talking

145

about essentially quantitative relationships, even though they
present them informally and in everyday language rather than in
symbols. This is true, for example, of the geopolitical treatments
of the way military strength varies with distance, that underlie
some of the familiar notions of spheres of influence. So, for
example, Spykman: "Power is effective in inverse ratio from its
source"^^; and Kennan: "... the effectiveness of the power radiated
from any national center decreases in proportion to the distance
involved. "^'^

The assumption of a sharp weakening of strength with
distance underpins much of the recent discussion of the need to
reduce American commitments (though, of course, the motivation
of the debate has less to do with theory than with the frustrations
of the Vietnamese war). The theory runs: Great powers can use
force to keep distant great challengers at a distance from areas
near their border, their "sphere of influence"; this makes possible
a balance which is best left alone; it protects at the same time as
it limits the interests of opposing states, and in any case it cannot
successfully be upset.

It is both a strength and a weakness of this traditional theory
of a proportionate weakening of strength with distance that
its purity is marred by qualifications about differences in the
variation of strength over air, sea, and land distances. References
to "air powers" or "naval powers" versus "land powers" make
evident that the pure theory needs qualification, but do not make
clear just how such qualification can he effected. Some of the more
formal quantitative theories on the other hand are quite pure.

(2) Kenneth Boulding has formulated a general theory of
conflict and defense that is intended to comprehend the relation to
distance of both classical or conventional strength and the strength
of current forces of "world-wide range. "^^ (The traditional theory
I have outlined contemplates classical strength only.) His theory
states in brief: In the classical case the amount of strength provided
out of given resources decreases, or the cost of maintaining a
fixed amount of strength increases, linearly with distance; stable
equilibria between widely separated large and small powers
are therefore possible; but in the case of contemporary delivery
technology, the loss of strength with distance vanishes, as does
also the chance of stable systems of national defense.

Boulding' s mathematical model is derived from models devel-
oped by Harold Hotelling and Arthur Smithies for the analysis
of the spatial competition between economic firms distributed in
a line. It involves some simple linear differential equations, for

146

which he offers as one interpretation: two countries, with their
homes at points A and B respectively, each have a certain number
of men who can be devoted to fighting; at a point outside the home
countries, say between A and B, some out of the total number of
men that each can muster have to be devoted to supporting the
fighters, leaving fewer to fight; the farther out from A and nearer
to B the fighters from A go, the more bearers are needed and so
there are fewer fighters. ("Bearing" or "supporting" can be used
inclusively to mean all activities other than fighting needed to
make fighting possible.) If the forces available to A at home are
larger than those available to B at home, they may still reach some
point of equality in number of fighters at some point in between
that is nearer to B. Though the theory is essentially a logistic one,
it is assumed that at the point of equality the conflict is going to be
a tie, hence an equilibrium point.

Boulding's model is static as well as linear. It has the virtue,
however, of being more precisely simple than the traditional
theory, which it generalizes slightly. Like the traditional theory, it
assumes that strength is one-dimensional. (Boulding recognizes at
one point that strength is really multi-dimensional, but dismisses
this as a second-order effect,^^ as he dismisses deviations from
linearity as minor. ^')

(3) It is possible to look more closely at various components
of strength and how they vary with distance and to pay attention
to a host of variables absent or implicitly held constant in a simple
model, formal or informal. For either classical or nuclear strength
one can examine not merely logistics or combat delivery, but also
the attempts to interdict supplies and to use offense or defense to
blunt opposing fire. And even so far as logistics is concerned, one
can look at the alternative systems of transport available at any
given time, at the result of varying allocations of resources to the
purchase of lift or other support capabilities, and at changes in the
technology of transport and communications at a distance. If one
does this, in realistic, empirical detail, it is apparent that the linear
picture of one-dimensional strength declining with distance is not
merely a vast oversimplification of reality; it is wrong. In the first
place, at any given time, and especially today when the range of
possible sorts of conflict has increased dramatically, strength (as
we have suggested) cannot be measured by a single arithmetic
quantity, but by a sequence of many; and so for loss of strength.
This is by no means a second-order effect. Equilibrium points that
balance the strengths of two nations with respect to one component
of the vector will not in general coincide with points that equalize

147

strength with respect to other components. And problems of
the stability of equilibrium are much more complicated for both
theory and practice.

Second, even when we look at components of strength, neither
nuclear nor nonnuclear components behave like the simple linear
picture. I shall sketch the results of some relevant close analyses of
nonnuclear cases in the 1960s: the support capabilities in possible
wars in Himalayan India and in Thailand by China on the one
hand and the United States on the other. And I shall also outline
a few of the results of an extensive nuclear study — the variation
with critical distances of various sorts of nuclear strength during
the 1950s.

Take the nonnuclear cases. Following Boulding, the linear
model of decrease of strength with distance may be represented
in the case of two powers with unequal home strength as a
kind of lopsided M with legs of different heights representing
the strengths of each of the two powers at home, and with the
two slanting members meeting at a point nearer the shorter leg.
Something like:

The vertical legs represent the strengths at home of the two
countries; the slanting lines show how the strength declines at
various distances away from home toward the adversary. The
point at which they meet is their equilibrium point.

This simple picture, I believe, is a fair representation of what
a good many columnists and members of Congress have in mind
when they talk of comparative disadvantages to the United States
in fighting eight or ten thousand miles away from home against
an adversary whose home base is near the scene of conflict. A
curve representing the lift capability of the United States from
its borders to the China-India border in the Himalayas and a
Chinese capability from Cheng-tu-Szechwan to the same points
in the Himalayas looks very different. It is both nonlinear and
discontinuous. One such curve is shown in the accompanying
Figure 1. Another such curve in Figure 2 shows the change in
support capability of each side as a function of distance from
home to battle on the Thai-Laos border.

The most striking fact displayed by these figures, however, is
that the long-distance lift capacity of each side massively exceeds

148

their short-distance lift inside the theater, especially in the very
short ranges in which the battle would be joined. But these
bottlenecks inside the theater are to a very considerable extent
determined by local factors: harbors, ports and loading facilities,
railroad and road capacities, etc. They are not a function of the
long-haul distances. The dramatic sweep of the curves showing,
for example, the first 8,100 miles of hauling from the United States,
while it catches the headlines and affects intuitive judgments,
hardly determines the results. The bottlenecks are inside the
theater. The important factors are the unimportant-looking little
ripples in the cascade at the bottom of the chart which are so small
that, in the Indian case, we have used a balloon within a balloon
to magnify them enough to be visible. Nearly the same is true
in the Thai-Laos case, where the United States from 8,500 miles
away can lift four times as much to the Thai-Laos border as China
can from 450 miles off; and U.S. capability in the combat zone is a
small fraction of its long-haul capability.

If one looks at it in cost terms, the minor importance of the
long haul appears even more vividly. It can be shown that adding
several thousand miles to the distance at which remote wars are
fought adds a very tiny percentage to the cost of fighting such
wars.

The curves displayed, it should be stressed, are the result of
a great deal of grubby, inglorious empirical work using a variety
of detailed operational models to calculate the capacity of road
nets in various seasons and a host of other laborious but necessary
inquiries. One might be tempted to dismiss such labors as of little
theoretical importance. However, they are important both for
policy and for theory. Intuition on such matters is not enough,
even when presented in formal mathematical dress. The curves
show this.

149

GANGES

RIVEK

CHENGTU
t

Fir;. 1. Lift fnim UnilcJ Stdlcf maiiiLind iind Ftoei SiSfc^ivi-.Tr

[je* detail obsvc)

Or|i,:n[-Ii,d[i| luinltr.

BANGKOK

NAKORN -THAKHEK CHINA/MVN
PHANOM-v/ (LAOS) Border

DETAIL: Bongkok fo Nokorn Phanom
versus Chinese border to Thcik^ek

Chino/MVN border

2 3 4 5 6
Tfiouiands of miles

(see del^oil cbovi

Fifi. a. Lift frflfli Uilik-d States miiQl^nd iiml Ciiinti Ijordei to Tliili-Liirts liiirdcn
( Wolllslttlcr and Hoinejr, 19{t0.)

150

The nuclear case also behaves quite differently from the
assumption. First, if we neglect opposition by offense or defense,
the costs of nuclear strength on the linear model should not
increase significantly with distance. In fact, they do, and more
than linearly; that is, more than the model suggests even for
nonnuclear strength. (The formal linear model of strength
weakening with distance also neglects opposition.) Cost curves
for the 1950s generation of subsonic turbojets have an J-shaped
form, rising asymptotically at points less than the maximum base-
target distance, and costs of tanker refueling systems increase in
steps at an increasing rate. Ground refueled systems increase
in steps modestly. (Among other things, this suggests the wide
variation at any given time in cost-radius curves depending on the
choice of system.)

In the nuclear case, if one takes into account opposition by
offense and defense — which means examining a very large
number of potential conflicts and the interdependent choices of
both sides in these conflicts — then the situation is reversed; it is
even further from the simple linear model. Then the costs of a
nuclear second-strike capability in the 1950s decrease sharply
and effectiveness increases if operating bases are kept far back
at intercontinental range. The decrease in costs and the increase
in effectiveness, however, are not monotonic. While an overseas
base system close to adversary attack was vulnerable, as well as
difficult to support, an intermediate operating base system was
even more costly and almost as vulnerable, with nearly all of the
defects of the overseas base system plus a good many others of
its own (extremely high aerial refueling costs, etc.). In fact, the
intermediate operating base system combined the defects of the
vulnerable overseas operating base system with the defects of
an extremely high-cost, exclusively air-refueled intercontinental
system. The latter was considered and rejected as an alternative
to an intercontinental ground-refueled system. Against moderate
enemy offense the least costly system was the intercontinental
ground-refueled system. The advanced overseas base system
was some 50 percent higher, and an intercontinental air-refueled
system was roughly double the cost. The intermediate system was
nearly triple the cost. Against a more formidable enemy offense
the advanced overseas operating base system became about as
expensive as the exclusively air-refueled intercontinental system.
The intercontinental ground-refueled system remained cheapest

151

and the intermediate system remained worst, being more than
three times as costly for a given performance.

The importance of distance for the determination of nuclear
strength is not merely a phenomenon of the 1950s. While the nature
of the dependency changes, some large country examples (like
the American extended-range Minuteman III and the enormous
expenditures to increase the range of submarine-launched missiles)
show the continuing importance of such complex dependency in
the 1970s. And the troubles to be experienced by the medium-sized
and smaller nth countries illustrate the continuing importance of
distance even more vividly.

Sociologists and students of international politics have
frequently referred to the maximum range of individual aircraft
or missiles and the growth of this maximum range over calendar
time as an indicator of the increasing capabilities for projecting
military strength or civilian transport and travel and the
consequent increasing interdependence of the world. Boulding's
use of this parameter is then a familiar one.^" However, while
maximum delivery range or maximum speed of individual
aircraft or maximum destructive radius of current explosives are
suggestive, they are inadequate measures of strength. They deal
with performance only crudely and leave out costs altogether.
There is, for example, no direct connection between the maximum
range of individual vehicles and national capabilities to do battle
at a distance. Even if one neglects the subtler considerations of
performance affected by interactions with adversaries, the factor
of cost is essential. The nuclear propelled airplane, for example,
a vehicle of very extended range, could be established in the
1950s as a poor way of projecting strength, one that would lower
capabilities for fixed resources. This became obvious when one
considered even a crudely measured performance for an entire
system to be bought and operated out of a given budget. The unit
costs were so high that adopting the system would have meant,
for a fixed expenditure of resources, a decided reduction in the
strength we could project even nearby.

Finally, the belief that stable nuclear equilibria are impossible
owes its origin to some of the hoariest conceptions of the nuclear
age. It neglects, among a good many other critical matters,
the difference between first- and second-strike capabilities.
Such stabilities are feasible, but limited and uncertain and not
automatic.

152

C. Specifics and the General: Imaginary Gardens with Real Toads

I have tried to describe some of the features of opposed-
systems analyses, and some of their chief limitations to date, and
I have used as illustration some results that bear on variations
of strength with distance. The models used in opposed-systems ■
design are plainly not intended to cover all the characteristics
of all possible relations among nation-states from the Treaty
of Westphalia on, nor all of the data that have been generated
by agencies reporting on one or another aspect of the various
nation-states or their intercourse. They are limited and partial. It
is sometimes suggested by writers on some future international
theory that one has the alternative of constructing a partial or
limited theory on the one hand, or a total or general theory on
the other. However, no theory is "total" in the sense that it deals
with all possible traits of any given subject matter, and the notion
of "generality" is an ambiguous one. Sometimes when one says
that theory T^ is more general than theory T^, one means that T^
is a special case of T^ and deducible from it. T^ is more powerful,
has more content. On the other hand, sometimes one says T^ is
more general than T^ when it is a proper part of T^— as a geometry
may be a proper part of a physical theory, and so may have less
content. Or one may call a theory general because it has some
undetermined parameters. In that case it is not an empirical
statement. It might become one if operationally meaningful
constants are substituted for the parameters, or if the parameters
can be "bound," that is, said to hold for all or some values. For
such parameters are, of course, really variables. They are blanks,
pronouns without antecedents. Like some economic models,
some of the formal models in international politics may be of this
character.

Boulding's own general theory is general in this sense. A great
deal of it consists in elementary truths of analytic geometry. These
identify various regions of a quarter plane as regions of stability
or instability. Though such statements yield categories of possible
systems, they have no empirical content specific to international
conflict. And the curves that divide the quarter plane, like the
straight lines we have examined, have slight empirical relevance.
In fact, the notion of "strength" as such is given no operational
content. A typology of possible systems may be of use, but it
is important to be clear that one is dealing with taxonomy, not
with theoretical laws (much less "the great law of diminishing

153

strength with distance"^^). It is all too easy in constructing such
a model, as I have remarked elsewhere, to get the exhilarating
feeling that one is filling holes when one is only outlining them.
Boulding contrasts his own theoretical bias with the sociological
and taxonomic bias of political scientists working on types of
international systems. He exaggerates the contrast. There is
nothing wrong with taxonomy. It can be a most useful stage in
preparation for the formulation of laws, but for this purpose one
has to be clear about the difference.

The work of the Quaker physicist, L. F. Richardson, after
some vicissitudes of attempted statistical testing, tends now also
to be reduced to typology. Richardson started out by formulating
differential equations of a very simple form, relating the rate of
increase of arms expenditures of each side in any arms competition
to the amount of the expenditures of the other side. The equations
are essentially the same as the Lanchester equations described
earlier except that the variables refer not to initial forces of each
side but to the annual arms expenditures, and the right-hand side
of the equation is positive. The familiar solution is an exponential,
suggesting that arms expenditures lead to explosive arms races
and (with some lacunae in the inference) to wars. Richardson
began with this simple relationship about the time of World War
I, but in the course of the interwar debates introduced extra terms
and parameters into his equations to take into partial account
such countervailing influences as budget constraints. There are
enough terms and parameters in the equations to make them fit
just about any actual configuration of arms expenditures. And the
theory, which has been revived in recent years and is now rather
frequently cited,^^ has become essentially a taxonomy, a way of
classifying stable and unstable parameter values.

Richardson was an original and able research man. But there
are some rather large drawbacks in the typologies obtained from
the use of his equations. Constraints like those of a budget are
introduced only in a very inadequate and unrevealing way, with
no explicit reference to alternative choice. On the other hand, I
know of no persuasive historical example of the simple sort of
explosive arms process he had originally in mind where the extra
terms are of minor importance. The one historical case that some
contemporary commentators have called a "fairly successful"^^
application involved, among other substantial defects, only five
observations in all on annual differences in arms expenditures
before World War I. Hardly enough to be convincing. It will be

154

no fault of Richardson's if, out of our madness for method, we
accept the forms of these equations as a substitute for substance,
and make them a permanent addition to our gadgetry.

Fundamental theories with a very wide range of reference
may be based on common experience rather than on systematic
empirical tests, and they may say very little about any particular
subject matter. But they nonetheless can have great importance.
It is not my intention to disparage them. On the contrary, several
theories with a much wider range than any we have discussed
throw light on the structure of interdependent choices much
more fundamentally and inclusively than any study of national or
international choice. For example, the mathematical developments
of von Neumann, or more recently of Lloyd Shapley and others in
game theory, or the less rigorously formal theories of bargaining
and strategy of conflict in the sense of Schelling: these again are
much more general than a study of international politics.

Nonetheless, it would be a rather arbitrary usage to limit
application of the term "theory," still more of "explanation," to
works of such a high degree of generality; still more arbitrary
to limit it to models with undetermined parameters, sentential
functions rather than completed universal "if..., then.. ." statements.
Discussions of this subject tend to be muddled by a dichotomy
sometimes used between the "nomothetic" or law-like and the
"idiographic" that concerns particular, named objects, "some."
However, it is apparent that no statement— not even a singular
statement about individual objects — is idiographic in the sense
that it only concerns particulars. We say, for example, that such-
and-such an individual object bears some relation to such-another
one: "Jill tumbles after Jack." If we aspire to say something
rather than mutely to point, we have to ascribe properties, class
membership, relationships. And, on the other hand, very many
quite respectable laws contain references to particulars. They
contain the operator "all" in uneliminable fashion. But they
also use the operator "some," and may name individual objects.
Kepler's laws for solar orbits, for example, make up an important
theory, even though they refer to a subject restricted both in space
and time. Moreover, though this theory seems obvious to us now
(every new idea. Whitehead reminds us, has been called obvious by
someone who did not discover it), it was in fact a most precarious
inference from the astronomical observations available at the time.
Peirce found that there were 79 alternative theories that Kepler
tried before hitting on one that worked. Kepler's theory is less

155

general than Newton's, whose inverse-square law later showed
that bodies would move in an orbit that is a conic section, with the
origin of the central force at the focus. But even then, to derive
the elliptical form of solar orbits one needs to know the relative
masses and the relative velocities of the sun and the planets — all
individuals — and to neglect perturbing effects of some distant
masses. It is even possible, if we accept a hypothesis propounded
by the French physicist Duhem and also by Peirce, that all the laws
of nature, such as Newton's and quantum mechanics, hold within
the margin of error of our observations only for very, very long
historical epochs. It is conceivable that the relations are slowly
changing. In that case, of course, all laws would be restricted in
space and time.

The word "theory" is used in the field of political science
rather differently from its most familiar usage in the natural
sciences, or in economics. It is frequently reserved for very basic
studies in the philosophy of politics, and sometimes for studies
in the history of the philosophy of politics. These seem to me to
be valid enterprises, interesting and rewarding. And, though
the word "theory" has, at least in academic circles, a eulogistic
character, it would be a waste to spend much time arguing for the
title.

Like some of the more general empirical theories, and unlike
some of the crude empirical statistical associations, the models
used in opposed-systems analyses are essentially general. A good
many of the statements in them refer to domains of potential
operations and cannot be reduced to statements about individuals.
They are idealizations. They are hypothetical, like some of the
more general theories. However, if I may borrow a phrase from
Marianne Moore, these are "imaginary gardens with real toads in
them." The restriction in time permits great specificity in input,
the use of laws with bound variables and genuine constants rather
than sentential functions, and a richness in detailed conclusions.

Very general theories and some simplified small-group
experiments are sometimes used to justify policy conclusions,
even though some essential specifics are lacking. Much of the
discussion of the state of strategic forces on the international scene
is discouragingly innocent of an awareness of even the relevance
of specific information, not to say of the information itself. It
makes a good deal of difference whether a strategic force is based
on 400 bases or on 28. It makes a difference whether a third of
the force is in the air at all times, with fuel tanks full enough to

156

complete a combat mission, armed with all the necessary electronic
equipment and other preparations; or only four percent of the
force, and that almost entirely on training missions, unarmed,
and on the average inadequately fuelled for combat. It makes
a difference whether the tactical warning provided by radars
along feasible routes and profiles of attack matches the degree of
readiness and speed of response of the forces warned. In the 1950s
a great many members of the academic community, as well as
journalists and members of governments, were in error on each of
these and a good many other essential factors affecting capacities
for second strike, and yet spoke rather blithely about policy on the
subject. Many analyses of the Cuban missile crisis are affected by
the same carefree indifference to essential features of the military
stance of each side. Some of these data are, of course, governed
by rules of secrecy and, even with all the data available, inference
must be uncertain. However, such uncertainty can be reduced
with information, and on a good many critically important
military relations among states, the effects that dominate results
are gross enough to show up in public data, provided these are
gathered diligently and analyzed systematically and with care.
Some very interesting things can be said, for example, about nth
countries only on the basis of such empirical analysis, and on
the basis of using a logical apparatus considerably more refined
than a few bare distinctions like that between "vulnerable" and
"invulnerable" force.

An opposed-systems analysis is at the level of generality
appropriate to policy choice. This is, of course, not surprising,
since that is how opposed-systems analysis got started. I have
said very little about the relationship of policy to valid theory.
In the field of international politics, an interest in policy hardly
needs justification. Just about everyone in the field is interested
in policy. I am using the word "interest" in both of its meanings:
they are fascinated by it and have a stake in it. I believe that the
likelihood of useful analyses for the choice of ends — and of means
for achieving such ends — is enhanced if the analyses are systematic
and explicit about objectives as well as instrumentalities; for one
thing, they are then open both to self-criticism and to public
examination. How analyses performed to aid policy might affect
policy is a subject that has received extended comment. I would
like to close with a speculation on the theoretical potential of
policy designs.

There is, of course, an old academic snobbery about applied
science in general. Applied science is distinctly lower-class. Such

157

snobbery affects the social sciences, too. It is clear that work on
policy needs theory. The fact that this can be a two-way street,
while sometimes recognized in the natural sciences, seems
much less frequently, if at all, to be recognized in the social
sciences. It is familiar to historians of science that, in the words
of the philosophical biologist, L. J. Henderson, thermodynamics
owes more to the steam engine than the steam engine owes to
thermodynamics. This is evident in the work of Sadi Carnot. It
seems plausible to me that something of the same sort might hap-
pen in social science. It may be that well-evidenced generalizations
will be easier to come by where they concern or stem from
alternative designed operations and social structures — especially
where these structures involve complex interdependencies of
men and machines — than where they stem from the haphazard
reports of the workings of unpremeditated institutions that
have grown mostly without intent. In the latter case, research
men are sometimes reduced to correlating each time-series so
gathered with every other time-series in their possession. Though
designed social structures or policy alternatives are normally
quite complex in the field of political-military affairs, they may
be rather better understood or more accessible to understanding
than the unpremeditated complexities normally dealt with in the
social sciences. On the other hand, they may be more interesting
because they are complex and have more direct social relevance
than small-group experiments. While such experiments are, of
course, the work of design, and may be of great interest, it is
sometimes rather hard to make the inferential jump from the
small experimental group to the large social or political groupings
that concern us.

There is no single best path through the tangle of international
politics to basic theory. One useful trail may lead through the
analysis and design of complex systems that are viable in a world
of partially hostile and independent states.

ENDNOTES - Wohlstetter - Theory and Opposed-Systems
Design

Note: The original version of this essay contains in-text citations
and a list of works cited at the end. In this version, in-text citations were
converted into endnotes. Text hounded by square brackets generally
indicates such a conversion.

158

1. [Burton Marshall, "Waiting for the Curtain," SAIS Review,
Vol. 10, No. 4, Summer 1966, p. 21.]

2. The term "essentially general" is adapted from C. G.
Hempel. [Hempel, Aspects of Scientific Explanation, New York, NY:
Free Press, 1965, pp. 338ff.] An elaboration of this initial statement
is made later in the section entitled "Specifics and the General:
Imaginary Gardens with Real Toads." For those familiar with
the symbolism of mathematical logic, a partial and summary
statement can be made at this point: essentially general statements
include, besides those containing no individual names and only
universally bound variables, some that may refer to individual
objects, as Kepler's laws refer to the sun and its planets: they may
for example, be of the form "( x )Rxa." Or they may use existential
quantifiers such as the word "some" or the symbol "(ax)": they
may be of the form "(x) (3y)Rxy." But they also irreducibly in-
volve universal quantifiers like the words "all" or "every" or the
symbol "( x)."

3. See [Albert J. Wohlstetter, Fred S. Hoffman, Robert J. Lutz,
and Henry S. Rowen, The Selection of Strategic Air Bases, R-244-S,
special staff report, Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, March
1, 1953, TOP SECRET, declassified on July 1, 1963, available from
www.albertwohlstetter.com/writings/19530301-AW-EtAl-R244S.pdf\;
and [Albert J. Wohlstetter, Fred S. Hoffman, Henry S. Rowen, and
Robert J. Lutz, The Selection and Use of Strategic Air Bases, R-266,
final report, Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, April 1954,
TOP SECRET, declassified circa 1961, available from www.rand.
org/pubs/reports/R0266/\ .

4. [Albert J. Wohlstetter, Fred S. Hoffman, and Henry S. Rowen,
Protecting U.S. Power to Strike Back in the 1950s and 1960s, R-290,
staff report, Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, September 1,
1956, TOP SECRET, declassified circa 1960s, availabl e from www.
alhertwohlstetter.com/writings/19560901- AW-EtAl-R290.pdf\

5. [Albert J. Wohlstetter and Fred S. Hoffman, Defending a
Strategic Force After 1960: With Notes on the Need by Both Sides for
Accurate Bomb Delivery, Particularly for the Big Bombs, D-2270, Santa
Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, February 1, 1954, available from

www.albertwohlstetter.com/writings/19540201-AW-FH2270.pdf.]

159

6.[F. W. Lanchester, Aircraft in Wartime: The Dawn of the Fourth
Arm, London, UK: Constable, 1916.]

7. [R. E. Bach, L. Dolansky, and H. L. Stubbs, "A Loss
Minimizing Extension of the Lanchester Theory of Combat,"
Sc. Rpt., No. 3, Contract AF 19 (604)-4573, AD 235019, AFCRC-
TN-60-168, Northeastern University, January 31, I960]; [P. M. S.
Blackett, "Operational Research," Quarterly Journal of the British
Association for the Advancement of Science, No. 5, 1948, pp. 26-
38]; [H. Brackney, "Dynamics of Military Combat," Operations
Research, No. 7, 1959, pp. 30-44]; [R. H. Brown, A Stochastic Analysis
of Lanchester' s Theory of Combat, ORO-T-323, AD 82944, Operations
Research Office, Johns Hopkins University, December 1955]; [S. J.
Deitchman, "A Lanchester Model of Guerrilla Warfare, Operations
Research, No. 10, 1962, pp. 818-827]; [J. H. Engel, "A Verification
of Lanchester's Law," Operations Research, No. 2, 1954, pp. 163-
171]; [G. A. Gamow and R. E. Zimmerman, Mathematical Models
for Ground Combat, ORO-SP-11, Operations Research Office, Johns
Hopkins University, April 1957]; [T. Ganelius, "Mathematical
Treatment of Combat," Artilleri Tidskrift, No. 3, 1955, p. 84]; [B.
O. Koopman, Quantitative Aspect of Combat, Office of Scientific
Research and Development, AMP Note No. 6, August 1943]; [F. W.
Lanchester, Aircraft in Warfare: The Dawn of the Fourth Arm, London,
U.K.: Constable, 1916]; [P. M. Morse, "Mathematical Problems in
Operations Research," Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society,
No. 54, 1948, pp. 619-621]; [C. Tompkins, "Probabilistic Problems
and Military Evaluation: An Example," Logistics Papers, No. 2,
George Washington University, 1950]; [H. K. Weiss, Requirements
for a Theory of Combat, BRL Memo Report No. 667, Project No. TB
3-0102, Ballistic Research Laboratory, Aberdeen Proving Ground,
April 1953]; [Weiss, "Lanchester-type Models of Warfare,"
Proceedings of the First International Conference, Operations Research,
December 1957, pp. 82-99]; [Weiss, "The Fiske Model of Warfare,"
Operations Research, No. 10, 1962, pp. 569-571]; and [D. Willard,
"Lanchester as a Force in History: An Analysis of Land Battles
of the Years 1618-1905," AD 29735L 63-1-5, Div. 18A, Bethesda,
MD: Research Analysis Corporation, November 1962 (Limited
distribution: Request approval of: Office, Chief of Research and
Development, Department of the Army, Washington, DC, Attn:
Research Planning Division)].

For a critical statement, see [Albert Wohlstetter and Richard
B. Rainey, Jr., Distant Wars and Far Out Estimates, unpublished

160

paper prepared for presentation at the American Political Science
Association (APSA) meetings in New York, NY, on September 8,
1966; and at the Strategic Studies Conference, sponsored by MIT,
Endicott House, Dedham, MA, September 9 to September 11, 1966,
revised 1967], and especially [Charles Bernstein, "Reconsidering
Systems Analysis of Theater Air," paper presented at NATO
Symposium on Defense Resource Allocation, Paris, France,
September 20-22, 1966].

8. [J. H.Engel,"A Verification of Lanchester'sLaw," Operations
Research, No. 2, 1954, pp. 163-171.]

9. [Moshe Dayan, Diary of the Sinai Campaign, London, UK:
George Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966, p. 5.]

10. [The Military Balance, 1966-1967, London, UK: Institute of
Strategic Studies, 1967.] There is an error in the addition in the
figures for Israeli aircraft.

11. [Albert Wohlstetter, Strength, Interest and New Technologies,
opening address before The Implications of Military Technology in the
1970s, the Institute for Strategic Studies' ninth annual conference,
Elsinore, Denmark, September 28 to October 1, 1967, D(L)-16624-
PR, Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, January 24, 1968,
available from www.rand.org/about/history/wohlstetter/DL16624/
DL16624.html. The address was also published as Wohlstetter,
Strength, Interest and New Technologies, in The Implications of
Military Technology in the 1970s, Adelphi Papers No. 46, London,
UK: Institute for Strategic Studies, March 1968.]

12. [Charles J. Hitch, "On the Choice of Objectives in Systems
Studies," P-1955, Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, March
1960, p. 2.]

13. See [Albert Wohlstetter, "The Non-Strategic and Non-
Existent," in Kathleen Archibald, ed.. Strategic Interaction and
Conflict: Original Papers and Discussion, Berkeley, CA: Institute of
International Studies, University of California, Berkeley, 1966, pp.
107-126., esp. pp. 112-13]; also [Wohlstetter, "Defense Decisions:
Design Versus Analysis," IFORS Conference, Aix-en-Provence,
I960]; [Wohlstetter, "Analysis and Design of Conflict Systems," in
E. S. Quade, ed.. Analysis for Military Decisions, Chicago, IL: Rand

161

McNally & Co., 1964, pp. 103-148]; [E.S. Quade, "Introduction" and
"The Selection and Use of Strategic Air Bases: A Case History,"
in Quade, ed.. Analysis for Military Decisions, pp. 2-12, 24-64.];
[Alain C. Enthoven, "Systems Analysis and the Navy," Naval
Review, Annapolis, MD: United States Naval Institute, 1964, pp.
98-117]; [Hitch, "On the Choice of Objectives in System Studies"];
[Henry S. Rowen, "Improving Decision-Making in Government,"
lecture for the Budget Bureau's 1965 summer seminar on systems
analysis and program evaluation]; and [Fred S. Hoffman, "PPB,
Its Place in the Sun," speech at the American Bankers Association,
December 1967].

14. The point of view expressed here is developed at
considerably greater length in [Wohlstetter, "Analysis and Design
of Conflict Systems"].

15. Aaron Wildavsky, no radical critic, suggests the method
is tied to the existing political structure. See [Wildavsky, "The
Political Economy of Efficiency," The Public Interest, No. 8, Summer
1967, pp 30-48].

16. One might distinguish the theory or design of strongly
opposed systems from that of weakly opposed systems. In this
paper I have dealt mainly with the kind of potential opposition
familiar among nation states. While such opposition is only
partial it may lead to actual combat and this possibility is a
classic defining trait of the anarchic system of nation states. (See
the section, "Potential Wars.") Where internal dissent from the
institutions of the nation is large and powerful enough to interfere
in essential ways with their operation or possibly to effect a
change in them by force, much the same sort of analysis we have
described as opposed systems design is relevant both for the
dissenter and for the authorities. We might better call the subject
matter of such theory and design, in both the international and
national cases, "strongly opposed systems." But in the national
case there are some useful analogies even where governmental
or factional policies are more weakly opposed, where they do not
threaten internal war. Even then policy in some areas may be best
formulated with possible counter moves in mind. So, for example,
policies aimed at desegregating schools (by bussing nonwhites to
white schools or the reverse, or reducing the grade span of the city
schools so as to widen and make more varied the ethnic catchment

162

area from which pupils for any given school are drawn, and so
on) may be met by a movement of the more privileged whites into
private schools or out to the suburbs. Policies may be deliberately
chosen so as to minimize the effects of such countermeasures. In
designing systems that are "weakly" opposed, the opposition may
be dealt with by methods that stress conciliation, compromise, and
bargaining even more than in international affairs. But of course
the difference is one of degree, and in the international case, too,
compromise and conciliation are important modes of resolving
differences.

17. A much more extended discussion is contained in
[Wohlstetter, "Analysis and Design of Conflict Systems"].

18. For an extended analysis of the B-36 history, see [ibid.] .

19. For a detailed account, see [William Emerson, "Doctrine
and Dogma," Army, June 1963, pp. 818-827]. See also my essay
in the Kaplan volume referred to under Falk (to be published).
[Albert Wohlstetter, "Theory and Opposed Systems Design," in
Morton A. Kaplan, ed.. New Approaches to International Relations,
New York: St. Martin's, 1968, pp. 19-53.]

20. [R. N. Rosecrance and J. E. Mueller, "Decision-Making
and the Quantitative Analysis of International Politics," London
Year Book of World Affairs, 1967.]

21. See [Richard Falk, "New Approaches to the Study of
International Law," in Kaplan, ed.. New Approaches to International
Relations, p. 27].

22. See, for example, the cogent critiques by [Ernst B. Haas,
"The Balance of Power: Prescription, Concept or Propaganda?"

World Politics, No. 5, July 1953, pp. 442-477]; [Inis Claude, Power
and International Relations, New York, NY: Random House, 1962,
esp. chs. 2 and 3]; and [A. F. Pollard, "The Balance of Power,"
journal of the British Institute of International Affairs, No. 2, March
1923, pp; 51-64].

23. [Wohlstetter and Rainey, Distant Wars and Par Out
Estimates.]

163

24 . See, for example. The FederaUstNo.6, by Alexander Hamilton:
"To look for a continuation of harmony between a number of
unconnected sovereigns, situated in the same neighborhood,
would be to disregard the uniform course of human events." [The
Federahst, Cleveland, OH: Meridian, Books, 1961, p. 28.]

25. [Nicholas John Spykman, America's Strategy in World
Politics, New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1942, p. 448.]

26. [George Kennan, Russia and the West under Lenin and Stalin,
New York, NY: Mentor Books, 1962, p. 261.]

27. [Kenneth E. Boulding, Conflict and Defense, New York, NY:
Harper and Row, 1962.]

28. [Ibid., p. 241.]

29. [Ibid., p. 231.]

30. See [ibid., p. 272]. For a more or less standard sociological
example, see [Hornell Hart, "Social Science and the Atomic Crisis,
journal of Social Issues, Supplement Series No. 2, April 1949].
Compare also [Bruce M. Russett, Trends in World Politics, New
York, NY: Macmillan, 1965, esp. ch. 1]. Mr. Russett, however,
avoids the extrapolations into the future characteristic of Hart and
others.

31. [Boulding, p. 244.]

32. [Boulding, esp. ch. 2]; [Dean C. Pruitt, "Definition of the
Situation as a Determinant of International Action," in Herbert C.
Kelman, ed.. International Behavior, New York, NY: Holt, Rinehart
and Winston, 1965, pp. i22ff\; [Anatol Rapoport, Fights, Games and
Debates, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, I960]; and
[Rapoport, "Lewis Richardson's Mathematical Theory of War,"
Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 1, No. 3, September 1957, pp.
249-299].

33. [Boulding, p. 34]; [Pruitt, p. 423].

164

II. NUCLEAR DETERRENCE

165

Commentary: On Nuclear Deterrence
Alain C. Enthoven

Albert Wohlstetter was the most important strategic analyst
and thinker of our time. His ideas were the foundation of the
overall nuclear strategy of the John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B.
Johnson Administrations. His insights, recommendations, and
ensuing policies greatly reduced the otherwise high danger of a
thermonuclear war.

On a more personal scale, Albert was one of the most important
influences in my life: father-figure, teacher, mentor, and friend.
He was the intellectual godfather of the Systems Analysis Office
that 1 created and led in the 1960s under the direction of Charles
Hitch and Robert McNamara.^

Albert's effect on defense policy was profound and far-
reaching. He was the father of strategic analysis based on
systematic, empirical, and interdisciplinary studies. Indeed, he
raised the standards for what could pass as an analysis of a policy
issue in subsequent years. Albert searched out and asked the most
fundamental questions. He insisted that the actual details — missile
accuracies, reliabilities and pay loads, bomb yields, blast resistance,
bomber ranges, operating characteristics, costs, and much more —
mattered and must be factored carefully into a systems analysis.
Nuclear deterrence could not be dealt with sufficiently at a level
of generality that did not consider such details.

Economics typically focuses on analyzing choice among a
defined set of choices. For Albert, however, out of analysis emerged
new choices. Analysis was as much about the invention of new
solutions as it was choice among known alternatives.

While others made comparable contributions in the realms
of politics and management, and may get the recognition in the
history books, Albert's unique and essential contribution was in
building the intellectual foundations of American strategy and
defense policy, and how it must be studied. There, he had no
equal.

The Basing Study.

The high point of Albert's early work was the "Basing Study,"
in which he led an unusually talented team including economists
Fred Hoffman and Harry Rowen, and aeronautical engineer Bob

167

Lutz. With the Basing Study's two main reports — the 1953 staff
summary report, The Selection of Strategic Air Bases (R-244-S)/ and
the 1954 final report. The Selection and Use of Strategic Air Bases
(R-266)^ — he turned the thinking on strategic air power on its head.
He grasped the full significance of atomic and thermonuclear
weapons. He and his team saw that the role of strategic air power
could not be to carry on a protracted bombing campaign, a World
War II with bigger bombs as envisioned in what was the doctrine
at the time.* Such a war would be so destructive as to be not worth
winning. But even this type of war couldn't be fought with the
Strategic Air Command (SAC) based soft and concentrated on
relatively few overseas bases. After a Soviet attack on our bases,
there would be no SAC.

However, the Basing Study's most original insight was that
the role of SAC should be to deter attack, and that required SAC
to be able not only to survive a Soviet attack designed to destroy
it, but also to strike back— in short, to acquire a "second-strike
capability." And then he found that survival for a second-strike
was itself a very large challenge. Albert inspired and led a great
deal of research, ingenuity, and creativity to find solutions to that
problem. The whole idea of survival, second strike, and deterrence
came out of Albert's work and thinking.

In the decade after World War II, perhaps understandably,
there were many views extant regarding the significance of
nuclear weapons. Many thought that thermonuclear war would
be so destructive as to be unthinkable, and therefore could not
happen. Deterrence would be automatic. Albert and his team
found that deterrence was far from automatic and far from easy
to assure.

The Vulnerability Study.

Albert went on with the same team to do the follow-up
"Vulnerability Study," an extension of his analysis into the missile
age. With the Vulnerability Study's 1956 report. Protecting U.S.
Power to Strike Back in the 1950s and 1960s (R-290), he showed how
numerical superiority did not guarantee a credible deterrent:

The criterion of matching the Russians plane for plane,
or exceeding them, is, in the strict sense, irrelevant to
the problem of deterrence. It may even be, as has been
asserted, unnecessary to achieve such parity so long as

168

we make it crystal clear to the enemy that we can strike
back after an attack. But then we do have to make it clear.
Deterrence is hardly attained by simply creating some
uncertainty in the enemy's attack plans, that is, by mak-
ing it somewhat a gamble. The question is, how much of a
gamble? And what are his alternatives?^

R-290 demonstrated the need to base and operate America's
nuclear-armed bomber forces in ways that were not merely better
protected and more capable of surviving surprise attack, but also
much less accident-prone and much more controllable by the
political leadership, in peacetime and especially in times of deep
international crisis.

One of the many valuable activities that grew out of the
vulnerability inquiry was Harry Rowen's study of how to put
intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), the first of which were
based in vulnerable clusters above ground, in better protected
silos underground. These ideas of survival and second strike
eventually passed into our security culture, and became the
basis of defense policy. But they certainly were not obvious at
the time. They were intensely controversial in several respects.
For example, many authorities were sure that hardening bombers
in underground shelters and missile silos to the required degree
was impossible. I remember conferences where such judgments
were expressed most forcefully. So, Albert went out and found
Paul Weidlinger, a brilliant architect-engineer, who developed
solutions to the problems of blast resistance. In the case of the
missile silos, Weidlinger' s engineering and Rowen's systems
analysis were accepted and became the basis for our deployment
of Minuteman ICBMs.

Challenging Dominant Paradigms: "The Delicate Balance" and
After.

In the 1950s, people assumed that thermonuclear was so
horrible that nobody would start one. Except that we would, if
our NATO allies were attacked by the apparently overwhelming
Soviet army. Most people, though, were oblivious to the implica-
tions of the vulnerability of SAC at the time. This vulnerability
could have invited attack in a crisis, especially a crisis in which the
Soviets thought we would carry out our threat, in which case their
least worst alternative might be to launch a preemptive surprise

169

attack. Albert published his memorable article, "The Delicate
Balance of Terror," in Foreign Affairs to explain the problem to a
wider audience.*

Despite the Eisenhower Administration's acceptance of
many of Albert's programmatic recommendations for reducing
vulnerability, it remained for the new Kennedy Administration
to accept the broader strategic implications of his work. Whether
in the military, government, academia, or other professions, there
are such things as institutional interests and dominant paradigms
that are very hard to change. It's hard to just tear up the plans
and premises you have been acting on for years and admit that
you were wrong. Albert was fearless and relentless in his attack
on dominant paradigms when thorough analysis revealed they
were wrong. Wasn't there a bumper sticker that said, "Attack the
dominant paradigm"? If there was, it surely would have been the
right one for Albert's car.

Fortunately for America — and the world — presidential
candidate John F. Kennedy picked up on Albert's themes, and his
first acts as President of the United States included accelerating
the Minuteman as an underground-based ICBM, and the Polaris
sea-launched ballistic missiles in submarines. President Kennedy
personally changed the name of what were previously known
as "strategic offensive forces" to "strategic retaliatory forces" to
clarify the mission.

The Limits of Strategic Deterrence.

In the decade after World War II, the declared American policy
for deterring a Soviet non-nuclear attack on our NATO allies was,
as previously noted, to threaten an all-out thermonuclear attack
on the Soviet bloc. Albert addressed this policy in "The Delicate
Balance of Terror":

But the notion of massive retaliation as a responsible
retort to peripheral provocations vanished in the harsh
light of a better understanding here and abroad that the
Soviet nuclear delivery capability meant tremendous
losses to the United States if we attacked them. And now
Europe has begun to doubt that we would make the sac-
rifice involved in using SAC to answer an attack directed
at it but not ourselves.

170

John F. Kennedy borrowed this idea in his campaign and
denounced the massive retaliation policy as confronting the
President with a choice of "Suicide or Surrender; Humiliation or
Holocaust."* Albert himself, and through his disciples who went
on to serve in the Pentagon, expressed profound concern about
the uncontrolled, indiscriminate use of force. His studies led him
to recommend control and deliberation — and, later, discriminate
weapons such as accurate "smart weapons" and restraint in
targeting. Albert's ideas had a large impact on the thinking of
Secretary Robert McNamara. In the early years of the Kennedy
Administration, Albert's ideas won out, and the very great danger
of nuclear war was drastically reduced.

Albert was also very interested in NATO strategy, and very
influential in its development. He understood that the other best
way to reduce the danger of nuclear war was to eliminate our
need for the threatened first use of nuclear weapons by acquiring
adequate and effective non-nuclear forces.' Implementing this
idea took a longer struggle than gaining acceptance of the need
for a second-strike capability, but it was eventually successful.

Albert also directed attention to the flanks of NATO, and to
potential attacks outside the NATO area. In August 1990, Iraq's
surprise invasion of Kuwait fulfilled his prophecies.

Contemporary Relevance.

Albert's strategic views were "fact dependent," and facts
change. As noted above, the actual technical factors mattered. So
his legacy is as much in his intellectual standards and methods
of analysis as it is in specific strategic doctrines. One of the
most significant of Albert's legacies was to demonstrate the
importance of what can be accomplished by rigorous, diligent,
uncompromising search for truth in complex issues of public
policy. He was skeptical of policy conclusions that rested on

171

uncertain intelligence estimates, and sought solutions that
didn't depend on them even when they supported his case; he
was openly critical of official estimates on occasions when he
believed they reflected a policy bias. One cannot help wishing
that such an analytical attitude had prevailed concerning the
supposed presence of ongoing WMD programs in Iraq before
President Bush's 2003 decision to invade. Among the many and
large negative consequences of that error was the severe blow
to the credibility of U.S. intelligence capabilities and top-level
government decision-making processes.

Beyond that, the importance of Albert's insistence on
secure and survivable command, control, and communications
capabilities persists, as well as his insistence on the importance
of a high level of security of nuclear weapons. We now find it
clearly in our interest to help other nuclear powers maintain the
security of and national control authority over their weapons so
that they will not fall into the hands of nonstate actors who cannot
be deterred, or will not be used in unauthorized ways in a crisis.
Thus, we ought to be sure we are devoting adequate resources to
that end. Moreover, with nearly 18 years having elapsed since the
end of the Cold War, it is past time for publicly abjuring a policy
that Albert always opposed, maintaining ICBM forces in a posture
of readiness to launch on warning of an attack. He attacked that
reckless policy during the dangerous days of the Cold War; he
would certainly favor distancing ourselves from it now.

Albert's emphasis on the importance of and difficulty of
deterrence remains relevant in the case of nuclear-armed states.
Some may think that Iran can be deterred from attacking our vital
interests with nuclear weapons. But we must face the difficult
question of what would be an appropriate response. Surely,
the idea of an all-out nuclear counterattack on Iranian cities
would raise doubts in the minds of many reasonable people.
Albert's insistence on the importance of control and deliberation,
discrimination, and proportionality of response as a basis for a
credible deterrent, remains relevant.

The problem of nuclear deterrence is enormously more
complicated today than it was in the 1950s and 1960s when we
faced essentially a bipolar world, and we believed the Soviets
would act rationally in the interests of their own survival. (The
bipolar world model may have oversimplified things.) Now we
face a multipolar world, one in which nuclear weapons directed
at our cities may not have a clearly marked return address in a

172

nation-state. There now appears to be a significant danger that a
nuclear weapon might be obtained by nonstate actors who want
or are willing to die in an effort to deliver it to an American or
European city. This problem needs to be analyzed with the same
relentless determination, rigor, and thoroughness that Wohlstetter
and his associates applied in the 1950s. Such analyses might point
to important new technologies that need development.

Lessons from Wohlstetter's work include the fact that there
is usually a lot of superficial, fuzzy, and wrong thinking extant.
Just because 95 percent of people believe something to be true,
including high-ranking authorities who have access to classified
information, doesn't mean that it is true. For example, K. Wayne
Smith and I debunked the widely accepted myth of overwhelming
Soviet superiority in conventional forces in Europe in our book
How Much is Enough ? which we like to think was in the Wohlstetter
tradition.^" Fortunately, McNamara and both his presidential
bosses also doubted that myth.

Complex problems of strategy must be approached by
relentless pursuit of insight and truth, by people with access to
relevant detailed information. As Albert believed, the numbers
usually do matter. This makes it all the more important for our
government to make such informed but independent analysis
possible. This experience reflects creditably on the United States
Air Force and the Eisenhower Administration who continued
to support rand's independence even when Wohlstetter and
his team reached conclusions that were at variance with their
policies. In an era marked by so much political cronyism and
parochialism, it is important for our society to develop institutions
that can conduct such analyses with the necessary degree of
independence.

Not Just a Strategic Analyst.

On a more personal note, Albert was a remarkable person.
He didn't suffer fools gladly, but he was as hard on himself as on
others in the relentless search for valid insight and truth, and he
appreciated good work and good policy analysis when he saw it.
I felt the lash of his criticism for work not well thought through,
and also the warmth of his appreciation for good work. Albert
was a superb teacher.

Beyond the professional sphere, Albert was a great human
being, with a wide range of friendships and interests. He loved

173

life, music, art, poetry, felicitous toasts, flowers, architecture,
food, and dance — "George Balanchine and Szechuan cuisine." He
could speak intelligently on a vast range of topics.

Albert's judgment was never employed to better effect than in
his choice of Roberta as his wife. The affection between them was
evident to all who knew them well; but so was the importance
of Roberta to Albert's professional achievements. The smoothly
functioning domestic life she gave him allowed him the freedom
to devote himself to his work and indulge his aesthetic tastes. She
was also his closest colleague with outstanding accomplishments
of her own, in an area that complemented his interests. He often
acknowledged his dependence on her judgments of people
and situations. More important, her prize-winning work on the
problems of response to ambiguous intelligence warnings was
central to his approach to the difficulty of strategic deterrence."

This was a man of many facets and virtues. We miss his
presence. Our world is a far better place for his work.

ENDNOTES - Enthoven

1. The Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Systems
Analysis, subsequently renamed Office of the Assistant Secretary
of Defense for Program Analysis and Evaluation, is still in
existence 40 years later.

2. Albert J. Wohlstetter, Fred S. Hoffman, Robert J. Lutz,
and Henry S. Rowen, The Selection of Strategic Air Bases, R-244-S,
special staff report, Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, March
1, 1953, TOP SECRET, declassified on July 1, 1963, available from

www.albertwohlstetter.com/writings/19530301-AW-EtAl-R244S.pdf.

3. Albert J. Wohlstetter, Fred S. Hoffman, Henry S. Rowen,
and Robert J. Lutz, The Selection and Use of Strategic Air Bases,
R-266, final report, Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, April
1954, TOP SECRET, declassified circa 1961, available from www.
rand.org/pubs/reports/R0266/. The follow-up Vulnerability Study's
most representative report is: Wohlstetter, Hoffman, and Rowen,
Protecting U.S. Power to Strike Back in the 1950s and 1960s, R-290,
staff report, Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, September 1,
1956, TOP SECRET, declassified circa 1960s, available from www.
albertwohlstetter.com/writings/19560901-AW-Et Al=R290.pdf

174

4. For more on this topic, see Albert Wohlstetter's "Letter
to Michael Howard," November 1968, which is included in this
edited volume.

5. Wohlstetter, Hoffman, and Rowen, Protecting U.S. Power to
Strike Back in the 1950s and 1960s, p. 6.

6. Albert Wohlstetter, "The Delicate Balance of Terror," Foreign
Affairs, Vol. 37, No. 2, January 1959, pp. 211-234. Although Foreign
Affairs published an abridged version of "The Delicate Balance
of Terror," this edited volume includes the unabridged version:
Wohlstetter, The Delicate Balance of Terror (unabridged version),
P-1472, Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, November 6,
1958, revised December 1958, available from www .rand.org/ahout/
history/wohlstetter/P1472/P1472.html.

7. Ibid.

8. President John F. Kennedy, "Diplomacy and Defense: A Test
of National Maturity," a speech at the University of Washington's
100th Anniversary Program, November 16, 1961. An audio
recording and transcript of this speech is available online at the
JFK Library at www.jfklibrary.org/Historical+Resources/Archives/
Refer ence+Desk/Speeches/ Albert, while strongly supporting this
position, was nonetheless critical of the Kennedy campaign's
exploitation of the alleged "missile gap" to criticize the Eisenhower
Administration. He rejected the argument on the sufficient grounds
that it relied on the view that the strategic balance depended on
the size of the opposing strategic forces rather than on their ability
to survive and respond after a surprise attack.

9. See especially Albert Wohlstetter and Henry S. Rowen,
"Objectives of the United States Military Posture," RM-2373, Santa
Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, May 1, 1959, available from
www.rand.org/about/history/wohlstetter/RM2373/RM2373.html; and
Dean Acheson (with Albert Wohlstetter et ah), A Review of North
Atlantic Problems for the Future, the Committee on U.S. Political,
Economic and Military Policy in Europe's Policy Guidance to the
National Security Council, March 1961.

175

10. Alain Enthoven and K. Wayne Smith, How Much is Enough ?
Shaping the Defense Program, 1961-1969, New York, NY: Harper &
Row, 1971. A new edition of this book was recently published as:
Enthoven and Smith, How Much is Enough? Shaping the Defense
Program, 1961-1969, Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation,
2005.

11. Roberta Wohlstetter, Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision,
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1962.

176

The Delicate Balance of Terror (1958)

Albert Wohlstetter

P-1472, Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, No-
vember 6, 1958, revised December 1958, available from

www.rand.org/about/history/wohlstetter/P1472/P1472.html.
Courtesy of the Wohlstetter Estate.

1. Introduction

The first shock administered by the Soviet launching of
Sputnik has almost dissipated. The flurry of statements and
investigations and improvised responses has died down, leaving
a small residue: a slight increase in the schedule of bomber and
ballistic missile production, with a resulting small increment in
our defense expenditures for the current fiscal year, a considerable
enthusiasm for space travel, and some stirrings of interest in the
teaching of mathematics and physics in the secondary schools.
Western defense policy has almost returned to the level of activity
and the emphasis suited to the basic assumptions which were
controlling before Sputnik.

One of the most important of these assumptions — that
a general thermonuclear war is extremely unlikely — is held
in common by most of the critics of our defense policy as well
as by its proponents. Because of its crucial role in the Western
strategy of defense, 1 should like to examine the stability of the
thermonuclear balance which, it is generally supposed, would
make aggression irrational or even insane. The balance, 1 believe, is
in fact precarious, and this fact has critical implications for policy.
Deterrence in the 1960's will be neither inevitable nor impossible
but the product of sustained intelligent effort, attainable only by
continuing hard choice. As a major illustration important both for
defense and foreign policy, 1 shall treat the particularly stringent
conditions for deterrence which affect forces based close to the
enemy, whether they are U.S. forces or those of our allies, under
single or joint control. 1 shall comment also on the inadequacy as
well as the necessity of deterrence, on the problem of accidental
outbreak of war, and on disarmament.^

177

II. The Presumed Automatic Balance

I emphasize that requirements for deterrence are stringent. We
have heard so much about the atomic stalemate and the receding
probability of war which it has produced, that this may strike the
reader as something of an exaggeration. Is deterrence a necessary
consequence of both sides having a nuclear delivery capability,
and is all-out war nearly obsolete? Is mutual extinction the only
outcome of a general war? This belief, frequently expressed by
references to Mr. Oppenheimer's simile of the two scorpions
in a bottle, is perhaps the prevalent one. It is held by a very
eminent and diverse group of people — in England by Sir Winston
Churchill, P. M. S. Blackett, Sir John Slessor, Admiral Buzzard and
many others, in France by such figures as Raymond Aron, General
Gallois and General Gazin, in this country by the titular heads of
both parties as well as almost all writers on military and foreign
affairs, by both Henry Kissinger and his critic, James E. King, and
by George Kennan as well as Mr. Acheson. Mr. Kennan refers to
American concern about surprise attack as simply obsessive,^ and
many people have drawn the consequence of the stalemate as has
Blackett, who states: "If it is in fact true, as most current opinion
holds, that strategic air power has abolished global war, then an
urgent problem for the West is to assess how little effort must be
put into it to keep global war abolished."^ If peace were founded
firmly on mutual terror and mutual terror on symmetrical nuclear
powers, this would be, as Churchill has said, "a melancholy
paradox"; nonetheless a most comforting one.

Deterrence, however, is not automatic. While feasible, it
will be much harder to achieve in the 1960's than is generally
believed. One of the most disturbing features of current opinion
is the underestimation of this difficulty. This is due partly to a
misconstruction of the technological race as a problem in matching
striking forces, partly to a wishful analysis of the Soviet ability to
strike first.

Since Sputnik, the United States has made several moves
to assure the world (that is, the enemy, but more especially our
allies and ourselves) that we will match or overmatch Soviet
technology and, specifically, Soviet offense technology. We
have, for example, accelerated the bomber and ballistic missile
programs, in particular, the intermediate-range ballistic missiles.
The problem has been conceived as more or better bombers — or
rockets; or Sputniks; or engineers. This has meant confusing

178

deterrence with matching or exceeding the enemy's ability to
strike first. Matching weapons, however, misconstrues the nature
of the technological race. Not, as is frequently said, because only a
few bombs owned by the defender can make aggression fruitless,
but because even many might not. One outmoded A-bomb
dropped from an obsolete bomber might destroy a great many
supersonic jets and ballistic missiles. To deter an attack means
being able to strike back in spite of it. It means, in other words, a
capability to strike second. In the last year or two there has been a
growing awareness of the importance of the distinction between
a "strike-first" and a "strike-second" capability, but little, if any,
recognition of the implications of this distinction for the balance
of terror theory.

Where the published writings have not simply underestimated
Soviet capabilities and the advantages of a first strike, they have
in general placed artificial constraints on the Soviet use of the
capabilities attributed to them. They assume, for example, that the
enemy will attack in mass "over-the- Arctic" through our Distant
Early Warning line, with bombers refueled over Canada — all
resulting in plenty of warning. Most hopefully, it is sometimes
assumed that such attacks will be preceded by days of visible
preparations for moving ground troops. Such assumptions
suggest that Soviet leaders will be rather bumbling or, better,
cooperative. These are best called "Western-preferred-Soviet
strategies." However attractive it may be for us to narrow Soviet
alternatives to these, they would be low in the order of preference
of any reasonable Russian planning war.

III. The Quantitative Nature of the Problem and the
Uncertainties

In treating Soviet strategies it is important to consider Soviet
rather than Western advantage and to consider the strategy of
both sides quantitatively. The effectiveness of our own choices
will depend on a most complex numerical interaction of Soviet
and Western plans. Unfortunately, both the privileged and
unprivileged information on these matters is precarious. As
a result, competent people have been led into critical error in
evaluating the prospects for deterrence. Western journalists have
greatly overestimated the difficulties of a Soviet surprise attack
with thermonuclear weapons and vastly underestimated the
complexity of the Western problem of retaliation.

179

One intelligent commentator, Richard Rovere, recently
expressed the common view: "If the Russians had ten thousand
warheads and a missile for each, and we had ten hydrogen
bombs and ten obsolete bombers," . . . "aggression would still
be a folly that would appeal only to an insane adventurer." Mr.
Rovere' s example is plausible because it assumes implicitly that
the defender's hydrogen bombs will with certainty be visited on
the aggressor; then the damage done by the ten bombs seems
terrible enough for deterrence, and any more would be simply
redundant. This is the basis for the common view. The example
raises questions, even assuming the delivery of the ten weapons.
For instance, the targets aimed at in retaliation might be sheltered
and a quite modest civil defense could hold within tolerable limits
the damage done to city targets by ten delivered bombs. But the
essential point is that the weapons would not be very likely to
reach their targets. Even if the bombers were dispersed at ten
different points, and protected by shelters so blast resistant as to
stand up anywhere outside the lip of the bomb crater — even inside
the fire ball itself — the chances of one of these bombers surviving
the huge attack directed at it would be on the order of one in a
million. (This calculation takes account of the unreliability and
inaccuracy of the missile.) And the damage done by the small
minority of these ten planes that might be in the air at the time
of the attack, armed and ready to run the gauntlet of an alert air
defense system, if not zero, would be very small indeed compared
to damage that Russia has suffered in the past. For Mr. Rovere,
like many other writers on this subject, numerical superiority is
not important at all.

For Joseph Alsop, on the other hand, it is important, but
the superiority is on our side. Mr. Alsop recently enunciated as
one of the four rules of nuclear war: "The aggressor's problem
is astronomically difficult; and the aggressor requires an
overwhelming superiority of force."* There are, he believes, no
fewer than 400 SAC bases in the NATO nations alone and many
more elsewhere, all of which would have to be attacked in a very
short space of time. The "thousands of coordinated air sorties
and/ or missile firings," he concludes, are not feasible. Mr. Alsop's
argument is numerical and has the virtue of demonstrating that
at least the relative numbers are important. But the numbers he
uses are very wide of the mark. He overestimates the number of
such bases by more than a factor of ten,^ and in any case, missile
firings on the scale of a thousand or more involve costs that are

180

by no means out of proportion, given the strategic budgets of the
great powers. Whether or not thousands are needed depends on
the yield and the accuracy of the enemy missiles, something about
which it would be a great mistake for us to display confidence.

Perhaps the first step in dispelling the nearly universal
optimism about the stability of deterrence would be to recognize
the difficulties in analyzing the uncertainties and interactions
between our own wide range of choices and the moves open to
the Soviets. On our side we must consider an enormous variety of
strategic weapons which might compose our force, and, for each
of these, several alternative methods of basing and operation.
These are the choices that determine whether a weapons system
will have any genuine capability in the realistic circumstances
of a war. Besides the B-47E and the B-52 bombers which are in
the United States strategic force now, alternatives will include
the B-52G (a longer range version of the B-52); the Mach 2 B-58A
bomber and a "growth" version of it; the Mach 3 B-70 bomber;
a nuclear-powered bomber possibly carrying long-range air-to-
surface missiles; the Dynasoar, a manned glide-rocket; the Thor
and the Jupiter, liquid-fueled intermediate range ballistic missiles;
the Snark intercontinental cruise missile; the Atlas and the Titan
intercontinental ballistic missiles; the submarine-launched Polaris
and Atlantis rockets; the Minuteman, one potential solid-fueled
successor to the Thor and Titan; possibly unmanned bombardment
satellites; and many others which are not yet gleams in anyone's
eye and some that are just that.

The difficulty of describing in a brief article the best mixture
of weapons for the long-term future beginning in 1960, their base
requirements, their potentiality for stabilizing or upsetting the
balance among the great powers, and their implications for the
alliance, is not just a matter of space or the constraints of security.
The difficulty in fact stems from some rather basic insecurities.
These matters are wildly uncertain; we are talking about weapons
and vehicles that are some time off and, even if the precise
performances currently hoped for and claimed by contractors
were in the public domain, it would be a good idea to doubt
them.

Recently some of my colleagues picked their way through
the graveyard of early claims about various missiles and aircraft:
their dates of availability, costs and performance. These claims
are seldom revisited or talked about: De mortuis nil nisi bonum.
The errors were large and almost always in one direction. And

181

the less we knew, the more hopeful we were. Accordingly the
missiles benefited in particular. For example, the estimated cost of
one missile increased by a factor of over 50 — from about $35,000 in
1949 to some $2 million in 1957. This uncertainty is critical. Some
but not all of the systems listed can be chosen and the problem of
choice is essentially quantitative. The complexities of the problem,
if they were more widely understood, would discourage the
oracular confidence of writers on the subject of deterrence.

Some of the complexities can be suggested by referring to
the successive obstacles to be hurdled by any system providing
a capability to strike second, that is, to strike back. Such deterrent
systems must have (a) a stable, "steady-state" peacetime operation
within feasible budgets (besides the logistic and operational costs
that are, for example, problems of false alarms and accidents).
They must have also the ability (b) to survive enemy attacks, (c)
to make and communicate the decision to retaliate, (d) to reach
enemy territory with fuel enough to complete their mission, (e)
to penetrate enemy active defenses, that is, fighters and surface-
to-air missiles, and (f) to destroy the target in spite of any passive
civil defense in the form of dispersal or protective construction or
evacuation of the target itself.

Within limits the enemy is free to use his offensive and
defensive forces so as to exploit the weaknesses of each of our
systems in getting over any of these hurdles between peacetime
operation and the completion of a retaliatory strike. He will also
be free, within limits, in the Sixties to choose that composition of
forces for offense, and for active and passive defense, which will
make life as difficult as possible for the various systems we might
select. As I stressed earlier, much of the contemporary Western
confidence on the ease of retaliation is achieved by ignoring the
full range of sensible enemy plans. It would be quite wrong to
assume that the uncertainties I have described affect a totalitarian
aggressor and the party attacked equally. A totalitarian country
can preserve secrecy about the capabilities and disposition of
his forces very much better than a Western democracy. And
the aggressor has, among other enormous advantages of the
first strike, the ability to weigh continually our performance
at each of the six barriers and to choose a precise known time
and circumstance for attack which will reduce uncertainty. It is
important not to confuse our uncertainty with his. The fact that
we may not know the accuracy and number of his missiles will
not deter him. Strangely enough, some military commentators

182

have not made this distinction and have actually founded their
belief in the certainty of deterrence on the fact simply that there
are uncertainties.*

The slender basis for Western optimism is displayed not only
in the writings of journalists but in the more analytic writings of
professionals. The recent publications of General Gallois^ parallel
rather closely Mr. Alsop's faulty numerical proof that surprise
attack is astronomically difficult — except that Gallois' "simple
arithmetic," to borrow his own phrase, turns essentially on some
assumptions which are at once inexplicit and extremely optimistic
about the blast resistance of his dispersed missile sites to enemy
attacks from nearby.* Mr. Blackett's recent book. Atomic Weapons
and East-West Relations, illustrates the hazards confronting a most
able analyst in dealing with the piecemeal information available to
the general public. Mr. Blackett, a Nobel prize-winning physicist
with wartime experience in military operations research, mustered
a lucid summary of the public information available at the time of
his writing on weapons for all-out war. He stated:

It is, of course, conceivable that some of the facts have
been kept so secret that no public judgment of military
policy can have any great significance; in fact, that the
military authorities have up their sleeve some invention
or device, the possession of which completely alters the
military situation. On reflection we can see that it is fair-
ly safe to disregard this possibility.'

But unfortunately his evaluation of the use of intercontinental
ballistic missiles against bomber bases shows that it was not at all
safe to "disregard this possibility." Only a few pages further on,
he said:

It has recently been stated that some new method has
been devised in America by which the H-bombs can be
made small enough to be carried in an intercontinental
missile. This seems unlikely.^"

Mr. Blackett's book was published in 1956. It is now widely
known that intercontinental ballistic missiles will have hydrogen
warheads, and this fact, a secret at the time, invalidates Mr.
Blackett's calculations and, I might say, much of his optimism on
the stability of the balance of terror. In sum, one of the serious

183

obstacles to any widespread rational judgment on these matters
of high policy is that critical elements of the problem have to be
protected by secrecy. However, some of the principal conclusions
about deterrence in the early Sixties can be fairly firmly based,
and based on public information.

IV. The Delicacy of the Balance of Terror

The most important conclusion runs counter to the indications
of what I have called "Western-preferred Soviet strategies." It
runs counter, that is, to our wishes. A sober analysis of Soviet
choice from the standpoint of Soviet interest and the technical
alternatives, and taking into account the uncertainties that a
Russian planner would insure against, suggests that we must expect
a vast increase in the weight of attack which the Soviets can deliver with
Utile warning, and the growth of a significant Russian cap ability for an
essentially warningless attack. As a result, strategic deterrence, while
feasible, will be extremely difficult to achieve, and at critical junctures
in the 1960's we may not have the power to deter attack. Whether we
have it or not will depend on some difficult strategic choices as
to the future composition of the deterrent force and, in the years
when that force is not subject to drastic change in composition,
hard choices on its basing, operations, and defense.

The bombers will continue to make up the predominant part
of our force in the early 1960's. None of the popular remedies
for their defense will suffice — not, for example, mere increase of
alertness, the effects of which will be outmoded by the growth of
a Russian capability for attack without significant warning, nor
simple dispersal or sheltering alone or mobility taken by itself, or
a mere piling up of interceptors and defense missiles around SAC
bases. A complex of measures is required. I shall have occasion to
comment briefly on the defects of most of these measures taken
singly. Let me suggest at this point the inadequacy of the popular
conception of the airborne alert — an extreme form of defense
by mobility. The impression is rather widespread that one-third
of the SAC bombers are in the air and ready for combat at all
times. ^^ This belief is belied by the public record. According to the
Symington Committee Hearings in 1956, our bombers averaged
31 hours of flying per month, which is about four percent of the
average 732-hour month. An Air Force representative expressed
the hope that within a couple of years, with an increase in the
ratio of crews to aircraft, the bombers would reach 45 hours of

184

flight per month — which is six percent. This four to six percent of
the force includes bombers partially fueled and without bombs. It
is, moreover, only an average, admitting variance down as well as
up. Some increase in the number of armed bombers aloft is to be
expected. However, for the current generation of bombers, which
have been designed for speed and range rather than endurance, a
continuous air patrol for one-third of the force would be extremely
expensive.

On the other hand, it would be unwise to look for miracles in
the new weapons systems, which by the mid-1960' s may constitute
a considerable portion of the United States force. After the Thor,
Atlas, and Titan there are a number of promising developments.
The solid-fueled rockets, Minuteman and Polaris, promise in
particular to be extremely significant components of the deterrent
force. Today they are being touted as making the problem of
deterrence easy to solve and, in fact, guaranteeing its solution.
But none of the new developments in vehicles is likely to do that.
For the complex job of deterrence, they all have limitations. The
unvaryingly immoderate claims for each new weapons system
should make us wary of the latest "technological breakthroughs."
Only a very short time ago the ballistic missile itself was supposed
to be intrinsically invulnerable on the ground. It is now more
generally understood that its survival is likely to depend on a
variety of choices in its defense.

It is hard to talk with confidence about the mid- and late-
Sixties. A systematic study of an optimal or a good deterrent force
which considered all the major factors affecting choice and dealt
adequately with the uncertainties would be a formidable task. In
lieu of this, I shall mention briefly why none of the many systems
available or projected dominates the others in any obvious way.
My comments will take the form of a swift run-through of the
characteristic advantages and disadvantages of various strategic
systems at each of the six successive hurdles mentioned earlier.

The first hurdle to be surmounted is the attainment of a stable,
steady-state peacetime operation. Systems which depend for their
survival on extreme decentralization of controls, as may be the
case with large-scale dispersal and some of the mobile weapons,
raise problems of accidents and over a long period of peacetime
operation this leads in turn to serious political problems. Systems
relying on extensive movement by land, perhaps by truck caravan,
are an obvious example; the introduction of these on European
roads, as is sometimes suggested, would raise grave questions

185

for the governments of some of our allies. Any extensive increase
in the armed air alert will increase the hazard of accident and
intensify the concern already expressed among our allies. Some
of the proposals for bombardment satellites may involve such
hazards of unintended bomb release as to make them out of the
question.

The cost to buy and operate various weapons systems
must be seriously considered. Some systems buy their ability
to negotiate a given hurdle — say, surviving the enemy attack —
only at prohibitive cost. Then the number that can be bought out
of a given budget will be small and this will affect the relative
performance of competing systems at various other hurdles,
for example penetrating enemy defenses. Some of the relevant
cost comparisons, then, are between competing systems; others
concern the extra costs to the enemy of canceling an additional
expenditure of our own. For example, some dispersal is essential,
though usually it is expensive; if the dispersed bases are within a
warning net, dispersal can help to provide warning against some
sorts of attack, since it forces the attacker to increase the size of his
raid and so makes it more liable to detection as well as somewhat
harder to coordinate. But as the sole or principal defense of our
offensive force, dispersal has only a brief useful life and can be
justified financially only up to a point. For against our costs of
construction, maintenance and operation of an additional base
must be set the enemy's much lower costs of delivering one extra
weapon. And, in general, any feasible degree of dispersal leaves
a considerable concentration of value at a single target point.
For example, a squadron of heavy bombers costing, with their
associated tankers and penetration aids, perhaps a half a billion
dollars over five years, might be eliminated, if it were otherwise
unprotected, by an enemy intercontinental ballistic missile costing
perhaps sixteen million dollars. After making allowance for the
unreliability and inaccuracy of the missile, this means a ratio of
some ten for one or better. To achieve safety by hrute numbers in so
unfavorable a competition is not likely to be viable economically
or politically. However, a viable peacetime operation is only the
first hurdle to be surmounted.

At the second hurdle— surviving enemy offense — ground alert
systems placed deep within a warning net look good against a
manned bomber attack, much less good against intercontinental
ballistic missiles, and not good at all against ballistic missiles
launched from the sea. In the last case, systems such as the

186

Minuteman, which may be sheltered and dispersed as well as
alert, would do well. Systems involving launching platforms
which are mobile and concealed, such as Polaris submarines, have
a particular advantage for surviving an enemy offense.

However, there is a third hurdle to be surmounted — namely
that of making the decision to retaliate and communicating it. Here,
Polaris, the combat air patrol of B-52's, and in fact all of the mobile
platforms — under water, on the surface, in the air and above the
air — have severe problems. Long-distance communication may
be jammed and, most important, communication centers may be
destroyed.

At the fourth hurdle — ability to reach enemy territory with
fuel enough to complete the mission— several of our short-legged
systems have operational problems such as coordination with
tankers and using bases close to the enemy. For a good many years
to come, up to the mid-1960's in fact, this will be a formidable
hurdle for the greater part of our deterrent force. The next section
of this article deals with this problem at some length.

The fifth hurdle is the aggressor's long-range interceptors and
close-in missile defenses. To get past these might require large
numbers of planes and missiles. (If the high cost of overcoming
an earlier obstacle — using extreme dispersal or airborne alert or
the like — limits the number of planes or missiles bought, this
limitation is likely to be penalized disproportionately here.)
Or getting through may involve carrying heavy loads of radar
decoys, electronic jammers and other aids to defense penetration.
For example, vehicles like Minuteman and Polaris, which were
made small to facilitate dispersal or mobility, may suffer here
because they can carry fewer penetration aids.

At the final hurdle — destroying the target in spite of the passive
defenses that may protect it — low-payload and low-accuracy
systems, such as Minuteman and Polaris, may be frustrated by
blast-resistant shelters. For example, five half-megaton weapons
with an average accuracy of 2 miles might be expected to destroy
half the population of a city of 900,000, spread over 40 square
miles, provided the inhabitants are without shelters. But if they
are provided with shelters capable of resisting pressures of 100
pounds per square inch, approximately 60 such weapons would
be required; and deep rock shelters might force the total up to
over a thousand.

Prizes for a retaliatory capability are not distributed for getting
over one of these jumps. A system must get over all six. A serious

187

study of the competing systems in the late Sixties, as I stressed
earlier, will have to consider the fact that a sensible enemy will
design his offense and his active and passive defense so as to
exploit the known weaknesses of whatever systems we choose.
This sort of game, as anyone who has tried it knows, is extremely
difficult to analyze and necessitates caution in making any early
judgment as to the comparative merits of the many competing
systems. The one thing that is apparent on the basis of even a
preliminary analysis is that getting a capability to strike second in
the late Sixties means running a hard course.

I hope these illustrations will suggest that assuring ourselves
the power to strike back after a massive thermonuclear surprise
attack is by no means as automatic as is widely believed. What
can we say then on the question as to whether general war
is unlikely? The most important thing to say perhaps is that it
doesn't make much sense to talk about whether general war is
likely or not unless we specify a good deal else about the range of
circumstances in which the choice of surprise attack might present
itself to the Russians. Deterrence is a matter of comparative risks.
How much the Soviets will risk in surprise attack will depend in
part on the vulnerability of our future posture. These risks could
be smaller than the alternative of not striking.

Would not a general thermonuclear war mean "extinction"
for the aggressor as well as the defender? "Extinction" is a state
that badly needs analysis. Russian fatalities in World War II were
more than 20,000,000. Yet Russia recovered extremely well from
this catastrophe. There are several quite plausible circumstances
in the future when the Russians might be confident of being able to
limit damage to considerably less than this number — if they make
sensible strategic choices and we do not. On the other hand, the
risks of not striking might at some juncture appear very great to
the Soviets, involving, for example, disastrous defeat in peripheral
war, loss of key satellites with danger of revolt spreading —
possibly to Russia itself — or fear of an attack by ourselves. Then,
striking first, by surprise, would be the sensible choice for them,
and from their point of view the smaller risk.

It should be clear that it is not fruitful to talk about the likeli-
hood of general war without specifying the range of alternatives
that are pressing on the aggressor and the strategic postures of
both the Soviet bloc and the West. The balance is not automatic.
First, since thermonuclear weapons give an enormous advantage
to the aggressor, it takes great ingenuity and realism at any given

188

level of nuclear technology to devise a stable equilibrium. And
second, this technology itself is changing with fantastic speed.
Deterrence will require an urgent and continuing effort.

V. The Uses and Risks of Bases Close to the Soviets

It may now be useful to focus attention on the special problems
of deterrent forces close to the Soviet Union. First, overseas areas
have played an important role in the past and have a continuing
though less certain role today. Second, the recent acceleration of
production of our intermediate-range ballistic missiles and the
negotiation of agreements with various NATO powers for their
basing and operation have given our overseas bases a renewed
importance in deterring attack on the United States — or so it would
appear at first blush. Third, an analysis can throw some light on
the problems faced by our allies in developing an independent
ability to deter all-out attack on themselves, and in this way it
can clarify the much agitated question of nuclear sharing. Finally,
overseas bases affect in many critical ways, political and economic
as well as military, the status of the alliance.

Let me say something to begin with about the uses and risks
of basing SAC bombers overseas, first, on the costs of operating
at great range. Suppose we design a chemically fueled bomber
with the speed and altitude needed to penetrate enemy defenses
and we want it to operate at a given radius from target without
refueling. The weight of such a bomber along with the cost of
buying and operating it will increase at a growing rate with the
length of the design radius. Or, taking a specific bomber with
a fixed radius, the cost of extending its radius by buying and
operating aerial tankers will also grow at an increasing rate, with
additional air refuelings to extend radius. The state-of-the-art
during the past decade or so has been such that this has meant
a drastic rise in costs at distances less than those from bases well
within the United States to targets well within Russia. Or, looked
at another way, for a fixed budget this means a smaller number
of bombers capable of operating from far off than from close in
to Russia. Indeed, with the actual composition of our tanker and
bomber force, only a small proportion could be operated from
the current continental United States base system to our Russian
targets and back without some use of overseas bases.

At the end of the last decade, overseas bases appeared to be
an advantageous means of achieving the radius extension needed

189

by our short-legged bombers, of permitting them to use several
axes of attack, and of increasing the number of sorties possible in
the course of an extended campaign. With the growth of our own
thermonuclear stockpile, it became apparent that a long campaign
involving many re-uses of a large proportion of our bombers was
not likely to be necessary. With the growth of a Russian nuclear-
delivery capability, it became clear that this was most unlikely to
be feasible.

Our overseas bases now have the disadvantage of high
vulnerability. Because they are closer than the United States to
the Soviet Union, they are subject to a vastly greater attack by a
larger variety as well as number of vehicles. With given resources,
the Soviets might deliver on nearby bases a freight of bombs with
something like 50 to 100 times the yield that they could muster at
intercontinental range. Missile accuracy would more than double.
Because there is not much space for obtaining warning — in any
case, there are no deep-warning radar nets — and, since most of
our overseas bases are close to deep water from which submarines
might launch missiles, the warning problem is very much more
severe than for bases in the interior of the United States.

As a result, early in the Fifties the U.S. Air Force decided to
recall many of our bombers to the continental United States and to
use the overseas bases chiefly for refueling, particularly post-strike
ground refueling. This reduced drastically the vulnerability of U.S.
bombers and at the same time retained many of the advantages of
overseas operation. For some years now SAC has been reducing
the number of aircraft usually deployed overseas. The purpose
is to reduce vulnerability and has little to do with any increasing
radius of SAC aircraft. The early B-52 radius is roughly that of
the B-36; the B-47, roughly that of the B-50 or B-29. In fact the
radius limitation and therefore the basing requirements we have
discussed will not change substantially for some time to come.
We can talk with comparative confidence here, because the U.S.
strategic force is itself largely determined for this period. Such
a force changes more slowly than is generally realized. The vast
majority of the force will consist of manned bombers, and most
of these will be of medium range. The Atlas, Titan, and Polaris
rockets, when available, can of course do without overseas bases.
(Though it should be observed that the proportion of Polaris
submarines kept at sea can be made larger by the use of overseas-
based submarine tenders.) This is not true of the Thor and Jupiter.
But in any case, strategic missiles will be in the minority. Even

190

with the projected force of aerial tankers, this means that most of
our force, which will be manned bombers, cannot be used at all in
attacks on the Soviet Union without at least some use of overseas
areas.

We might distinguish varying degrees in the intensity of
such use. (1) At one extreme overseas bases could be simply
places to land bomber crews by parachute. (2) Or they might
provide emergency landing facilities for the bombers returning
from target. (3) They might support the landing of tankers after
they have fueled the bombers and so permit the transfer of larger
amounts of fuel. (4) They might be used to help stage the bombers
back to the United States (possibly to be turned around for another
sortie). (5) They might be used for staging bombers on the way to
as well as from the target. (6) They might support one or two such
"turn-arounds." (7) At the other extreme, they might support
continuous operation up to the outbreak of the war. The last of
these types of use (involving continuous close-in operation and
exposure before the outbreak) is, of course, the most vulnerable.
Five and six, which involve exposure intermittently only, and after
the start of war, are less vulnerable but nonetheless problematic.
In the case of the first four, an attack on the base would not
prevent the fulfillment by the bomber of at least a single mission
of retaliation.

The essential point to be made is that to use the majority of
our force will involve at least minimal employment of overseas
areas for the early Sixties. In this period some U.S. bombers will be
able to reach some targets from some U.S. bases within the original
forty-eight states without landing on the way back. On the other
hand, some bomber-target combinations are not feasible without
pre-target landing (and are therefore doubtful). However, most
of the bombers in the early Sixties will require some sort of touch
down of the bomber or the tanker or both on the way back to the
United States after fulfilling their mission.

In this section we have been discussing what I listed earlier as
the fourth hurdle, the problem of reaching enemy territory with
fuel enough to complete the mission. This is clearly an important
hurdle in the early Sixties. But how important is it that the
majority of the U.S. force of strategic vehicles be able to surmount
this obstacle? This depends essentially on how well the rest of
the force, which does not have range extension problems, can get
over each of the other five obstacles: for example, the problem of
surviving attack on the continental United States and penetrating

191

enemy passive and active defense. What I have said already
will suggest that these difficulties are large enough to make one
hesitate to throw away lightly a capability that might be obtained
by some form of radius extension overseas. Some touch down
overseas will remain useful to most U.S. bombers, which will
make up the greater part of the deterrent force in the early Sixties.
On the other hand, because these bases are within range of so
large a proportion of Russian striking power and subject to attack
with so little notice, their use by bombers will be severely limited
in form.

What of the bases for Thor and Jupiter, our first intermediate-
range ballistic missiles? These have to be close to the enemy, and they
must of course be operating bases, not merely refueling stations.
(This is one of the many differences between the missile and the
aircraft. Contrary to the usual belief, quite a few, though not all, of
these differences favor the aircraft as far as ground vulnerability
is concerned.) The Thors and Jupiters will be continuously in
range of an enormous Soviet potential for surprise attack. These
installations therefore reopen, in a most acute form, some of the
serious questions of ground vulnerability that were raised about
six years ago in connection with our overseas bomber bases. The
decision to station the Thor and Jupiter missiles overseas has been
our principal public response to the Russian advances in rocketry,
and perhaps our most plausible response. Because it involves our
ballistic missiles it appears directly to answer the Russian rockets.
Because it involves using European bases, it appears to make up
for the range superiority of the Russian intercontinental missile.
And most important, it directly involves the NATO powers and
gives them an element of control.

There is no question that it was genuinely urgent not only
to meet the Russian threat but to do so visibly, in order to save
the loosening NATO alliance. Our allies were fearful that the
Soviet ballistic missiles might mean that we were no longer able
or willing to retaliate against the Soviet Union in case of an attack
on them. We hastened to make public a reaction which would
restore their confidence. This move surely appears to increase our
own power to strike back, and also to give our allies a deterrent
of their own, independent of our decision. It has also been argued
that in this respect it merely advances the inevitable date at which
our allies will acquire "modern" weapons of their own, and that
it widens the range of Soviet challenges which Europe can meet.
But we must face seriously the question whether this move will

192

assure either the ability to retaliate or the decision to attempt it, on
the part of our allies, or ourselves. And we should ask at the very
least whether further expansion of this policy will buy as much
retaliatory power as other ways of spending the considerable
sums involved. Finally, it is important to be clear whether the Thor
and Jupiter actually increase the flexibility or range of response
available to our allies.

One justification for this move argues that it disperses
retaliatory weapons and that this is the most effective sanction
against the thermonuclear aggressor. I have already anticipated
this claim in my earlier discussion of the limitations of dispersal.
At this point, however, it is useful to comment on one variant
of the simple dispersal argument which is usually advanced
in connection with overseas bases, namely that they provide
a widespread dispersal and this in particular imposes insoluble
problems of coordination. This argument needs examination.
There is of course something in the notion that forcing the enemy
to attack many political entities increases the seriousness of his
decision. (However, (a) this can't be very persuasively argued as
the justification for the IRBMs since they will add few if any new
political entities to our current manned aircraft base system which
would have to be attacked by the Russians in order to destroy our
bombers; and, as we shall discuss, (b) where location in a foreign
country means joint control, we may not be able to use the base in
retaliation.) There is nothing on the other hand, or very little, in
the notion that dispersal in several countries makes the problem
of destruction more difficult in the military sense. Dispersal to
increase enemy force requirements does not involve separation
by oceans— just by the lethal diameters of enemy bombs. And the
coordination problem referred to is very widely misunderstood.
The critical part of the bomber coordination problem depends
especially on the time spent within warning nets rather than
simply the time of travel, and warning, as I have stressed, is
difficult to come by close to the Soviets. Moreover there is not very
much difference for the enemy in the task of coordinating bomber
attacks on Europe and the eastern coast of the United States, say,
and the job of coordinating attacks on our east and west coasts.

But the case of an enemy ballistic missile attack is most
illuminating. These missiles are launched vertically and, so to
speak, do not care in which direction they are told to proceed —
their times on trajectory are eminently calculable and, allowing
a cushion for failures and delays, times of firing can be arranged

193

for near-simultaneous impact on many dispersed points, on
Okinawa and the United Kingdom as well as on California and
Ohio. Moreover, it is relevant to recall that these far-flung bases,
while distant from each other and from the United States, are on
the whole close to the enemy. They require for their elimination
therefore a smaller expenditure of resources on the part of
Russia than targets at intercontinental range. For close-in targets
the Soviets can use a larger variety of weapons carrying larger
payloads and with improved accuracies.

The seeming appositeness of an overseas-based Thor and
Jupiter as an answer to a Russian intercontinental ballistic missile
stems not so much from any careful analysis of their retaliatory
power under attack as from the directness of the comparison they
suggest: a rocket with a rocket, an intercontinental capability
with a base at closer range to the target. In this respect the ready
optimism on the subject reflects the basic confusion, referred to at
the beginning of this essay, as to the nature of the technological
race. It conceives the problem of deterrence as that of simply
matching or exceeding the aggressor's capability to strike first.
A surprising proportion of the debate on defense policy has
betrayed this confusion. Matching technological developments
are useful for prestige, and such demonstrations have a vital
function in preserving the alliance and in reassuring the neutral
powers. But propaganda is not enough. The only reasonably
certain way of maintaining a reputation for strength is to display
an actual power to our friends as well as our enemies. We should
ask then whether further expansion of the current programs for
basing Thor and Jupiter is an efficient way to increase American
retaliatory power. If overseas bases are considered too vulnerable
for manned bombers, will not the same be true for missiles? The
basis for the hopeful impression that they will not be is rather
vague, including a mixture of hypothetical properties of ballistic
missiles in which perhaps the dominant element is their supposed
much more rapid, "push-button" response. What needs to be
considered here are the response time of such missiles (including
decision, preparation, and launch times), and how they are to be
defended.

The decision to fire a missile with a thermonuclear warhead
is much harder to make than a decision simply to start a manned
aircraft on its way, with orders to return to base unless instructed
to continue to its assigned target. This is the "fail-safe" procedure
practiced by the U.S. Air Force. In contrast, once a missile is

194

launched, there is no method of recall or deflection which is not
subject to risks of electronic or mechanical failure. Therefore such
a decision must wait for much more unambiguous evidence of
enemy intentions. It must and will take a longer time to make and
is less likely to be made at all. When more than one country is
involved, the joint decision is harder still, since there is opportunity
to disagree about the ambiguity of the evidence, as well as to
make separate considerations of national interest. The structure
of the NATO decision process on much less momentous matters
is complicated, and it should be recognized that such complexity
has much to do with the genuine concern of the various NATO
powers about the danger of accidentally starting World War III.
Such fears will not be diminished with the advent of IRBMs. In
fact, the mere widespread dispersion of nuclear armed missiles
raises measurably the possibility of accidental outbreak.

Second — the preparation and launching time. It is quite
erroneous to suppose that by contrast with manned bombers
the first IRBMs can be launched almost as simply as pressing a
button. Count-down procedures for early missiles are liable to
interruption, and the cryogenic character of the liquid oxygen fuel
limits the readiness of their response. Unlike JP-4, the fuel used in
jet bombers, liquid oxygen cannot be held for long periods of time
in these vehicles. In this respect such missiles will be less ready
than alert bombers.

Third — the warning available. My previous comments have
suggested that warning against both manned bomber and ballistic
or cruise missile attack is most difficult overseas in areas close to
the enemy. But this is related also to a fourth problem, namely
that of active defense. The less warning, the more difficult this
problem is. And the problem is a serious one, therefore, not only
against ballistic missile attacks but, for example, against low-
altitude or various circuitous attacks by manned aircraft.

And finally, passive defense by means of shelter is more
difficult given the larger bomb yields, better accuracies, and
larger forces available to the Russians at such close range. And
if the press reports are correct, the installations planned do not
contemplate bomb-resistant shelters. If this is so, it should be taken
into account in measuring any actual contribution to the United
States retaliatory power. Viewed as a contribution to deterring
all-out attack on the United States then, the Thor and Jupiter bases
seem unlikely to compare favorably with other alternatives. If
newspaper references to hard bargaining by some of our future

195

hosts are to be believed, it would seem that such negotiations
have been conducted under misapprehensions on both sides as to
the benefits to the United States.

But many proponents of the distribution of Thor and Jupiter —
and possibly some of our allies — have in mind not an increase in
U.S. deterrence but the development of an independent capability
in each of several of the NATO powers to deter all-out attack
against themselves. This would be a useful thing if it can be
managed at some supportable cost and if it does not entail the
sacrifice of even more critical measures of protection. But aside
from the special problems of joint control, which would affect the
certainty of response adversely, precisely who their legal owner is
will not affect the retaliatory power of the Thors and Jupiters one
way or another. They would not be able to deter any attack which
they could not survive. It is curious that many who question the
capability of American overseas bases (for example, our bomber
bases in the United Kingdom), simply assume that, for our allies,
possession of strategic nuclear weapons is one with deterrence.

It remains to examine the view that the provision of these
weapons will broaden the range of response open to our allies.
The proponents do not seem to regard an addition of capability
for NATO at the all-out end of the spectrum as the required
broadening; but if they do, they are faced with the question
previously considered: the actuality of this all-out response under
all-out attack. Insofar as this view rests on the belief that the
intermediate range ballistic missile is adapted to limited war, it is
wide of the mark. The inaccuracy of the IRBM requires high-yield
warheads, and such a combination of inaccuracy and high yield,
while quite appropriate and adequate against unprotected targets
in a general war, would scarcely come within even the most
lax, in fact reckless, definition of limited war. Such a weapon is
inappropriate for even the nuclear variety of limited war, and it is
totally useless for meeting the wide variety of provocation that is
well below the threshold of nuclear response. On the other hand,
though a contribution of American aid, it may not be without
cost to the recipient. Insofar as these weapons are expensive to
operate and support, they are likely to displace a conventional
capability that might be genuinely useful in limited engagements.
More important, they are likely to be used as an excuse for budget
cutting. In this way they will accelerate the general trend toward
dependence on all-out response and so will have the opposite
effect to the one claimed.

196

Nevertheless, if the Thor and Jupiter have these defects, might
not some future weapon be free of them? Some of these defects,
of course, will be overcome in time. Solid fuels or storable liquids
will eventually replace liquid oxygen, reliabilities will increase,
various forms of mobility or portability will become feasible,
accuracies may even come down to regions of interest in limited
wars. But these are all years away. In consequence, the discussion
will be advanced if a little more precision is given such terms
as "missiles" or "modern" or "advanced weapons." We are not
distributing a generic "modern" weapon with all the virtues of
flexibility for use in a wide range of attacks and invulnerability
in all-out war. Finally, even with advances in the state-of-the-art
on our side, it will continue to be hard to maintain a deterrent,
and even harder close in under the enemy's guns than further off.
Some of the principal difficulties I have sketched will remain and
others will grow. This is of particular interest to our allies who
do not have quite the same freedom to choose between basing
at intercontinental and point-blank range. The characteristic
limitations of "overseas" basing concern them since, for the most
part, unlike ourselves, they live "overseas."

It follows that, though a wider distribution in the ownership
of nuclear weapons may be inevitable, or at any rate likely, it is by
no means inevitable or even very likely that the power to deter an
all-out thermonuclear attack by Russia will be widespread. This
is true even though a minor power would not need to guarantee
as large a retaliation as we in order to deter attack on itself.
Unfortunately, the minor powers have smaller resources as well
as poorer strategic locations. ^^ A multiplicity of such independent
retaliatory powers might be desirable as a substitute for the
principal current function of the alliance. But they will not be
easy to achieve. Mere membership in the nuclear club might carry
with it prestige, as the applicants and nominees expect, but it will
be rather expensive, and in time it will be clear that it does not
necessarily confer any of the expected privileges enjoyed by the
two charter members. The burden of deterring a general war as
distinct from limited wars is still likely to be on the United States
and therefore, so far as our allies are concerned, on the alliance.

In closing these remarks on the special problems of overseas
bases, it should be observed that I have dealt with only one
of the functions of these bases: their use as a support for the
strategic deterrent force. They have a variety of military, political
and economic roles which are beyond the scope of this paper.

197

Expenditures in connection with the construction or operation of
U.S. bases, for example, are a form of economic aid and, moreover,
a form that is rather palatable to the Congress. There are other
functions in a central war where their importance may be very
considerable. In case deterrence fails, they might support a
counterattack which could blunt the strength of an enemy follow-
up attack, and so reduce the damage done to our cities. Their
chief virtue here is precisely the proximity to the enemy which
makes them problematic as a deterrent. Proximity means shorter
time to target and possibly larger and more accurately delivered
weapons — provided, of course, the blunting force survives the
first attack. This is not likely to be a high confidence capability of
the sort we seek in the deterrent itself; but it might make a very
real difference under some circumstances of attack, particularly
if the enemy attack were poorly coordinated, as it might be if the
war were started by an accident. In this case the first wave might
be smaller and less well organized than in a carefully prepared
attack. The chance of even some of our unprotected planes or
missiles surviving would be greater. Moreover a larger portion
of the attacker's force would remain on base, not yet ready for a
following attack. Using some portion of our force not in retaliation
but to spoil the follow-up raid by killing or at least disrupting
the matching of bombers with tankers, bombers with bombers,
bombers with decoys, and bombers with missiles, could reduce
both the number of attackers reaching our defenses and the
effectiveness of their formation for getting through. It would be
a fatal mistake to count on poor planning by an aggressor, but,
given the considerable reduction in damage it might enable, it is
prudent to have the ability to exploit such an error.

One caution should be observed. A force capable of blunting
a poorly started aggression and equipped with information as to
enemy deployments, might destroy a poorly protected enemy
strategic force before the latter got started. Missiles placed near
the enemy, even if they could not retaliate, would have a potent
capability for striking first by surprise. And it might not be easy
for the enemy to discern their purpose. The existence of such a
force might be a considerable provocation and in fact a dangerous
one in the sense that it would place a great burden on the deterrent
force which more than ever would have to guarantee extreme risks
to the attacker — worse than the risks of waiting in the face of this
danger. When not coupled with the ability to strike in retaliation,
such a capability would suggest — erroneously to be sure in the

198

case of the democracies — an intention to strike first. It would tend
to provoke rather than to deter general war.

One final use for our overseas bases should be mentioned,
namely their use to support operations in a limited war. Their
importance here is both more considerable and likely to be more
lasting than their increasingly restricted utility to deter attack
on the United States. Particularly in conventional limited wars,
destructive force is delivered in smaller units and, in general,
requires a great number of sorties over an extended period of
time. It is conceivable that we might attempt the intercontinental
delivery of iron bombs as well as ground troops and ground-
support elements. The problem of intercontinental versus
overseas bombers is mainly a matter of costs, provided we have
the time and freedom to choose the composition of our force and
our budget size. But there would be enormous differences in costs
between distant and close-in repeated delivery at a given rate of
high explosives.

I hope that my focus so far on the critical problem of deterring
central war has not led the reader to believe that I consider the
problem of limited war either unimportant or soluble by use of
the strategic threat. Quite the contrary is the case. In fact it would
be appropriate to say something about the limitations as well as
the necessity of strategic deterrence in this as well as other con-
nections. But first let me sum up the uses and risks of bases close
to the Soviet Union. These bases are subject to an attack delivering
more bombs with larger yields and greater accuracies and with
less warning than bases at intercontinental range. Whether they
are under American command, or completely within the control
of one of our allies or subject to joint control, they present the
severest problems for the preservation of a deterrent force.

VI. The Inadequacy of Strategic Deterrence, and Its Necessity

The inadequacy of deterrence is a familiar story. Western
forces at the end of the war were larger than those of the Soviet
Union and its satellites. We demobilized much more extensively,
relying on nuclear weapons to maintain the balance of East- West
military power. This was plausible then because nuclear power
was all on our side. It was our bomb. It seemed only to complete
the preponderance of American power provided by our enormous
industrial mobilization base and to dispense with the need to keep
it mobilized. It would compensate for the extra men kept under
arms by the East.

199

But the notion of massive retaliation as a responsible retort
to peripheral provocations vanished in the harsh light of a better
understanding here and abroad that the Soviet nuclear delivery
capability meant tremendous losses to the United States if we
attacked them. And now Europe has begun to doubt that we
would make the sacrifice involved in using SAC to answer an
attack directed at it but not at ourselves.

The many critics of the massive retaliation policy who advocate
a capability to meet limited aggression with a limited response are
on firm ground in suggesting that a massive response on such an
occasion would be unlikely and the threat to use it therefore not
believed. Moreover this argument is quite enough to make clear
the critical need for more serious development of the power to
meet limited aggressions. Another argument, which will not hold
water and which is in fact dangerous, is sometimes used: Little
wars are likely, general war improbable. We have seen that this
mistakes a possibility for its fulfillment. The likelihood of both
general and little wars is contingent on what we do. Moreover,
these probabilities are not independent. A limited war involving
the major powers is explosive. In this circumstance the likelihood
of general war increases palpably. The danger of general war can
be felt in every local skirmish involving the great powers. But
because the balance of terror is supposed, almost universally, to
assure us that all-out war will not occur, advocates of graduated
deterrence have proposed to fix the limits of limited conflict in
ways which neglect this danger. A few of the proposals seem in
fact quite reckless.

The emphasis of the advocates of limitation has been on the
high rather than on the low end of the spectrum of weapons.
They have talked in particular of nuclear limited wars on the
assumption that nuclear weapons will favor the defender rather
than the aggressor and that the West can depend on these to
compensate for men and conventional arms. Perhaps this will
sound reminiscent to the reader. These are, evidently, our tactical
nuclear bombs. I am afraid that this belief will not long stand the
harsh light of analysis and that it will vanish like its predecessor,
the comfortable notion that we had a monopoly of strategic
nuclear weapons and that these only completed the Western and,
specifically, the American preponderance. I know of no convincing
evidence that tactical nuclear weapons favor the defender rather
than the aggressor if both sides use such weapons. The argument
runs that the offense requires concentration and so the aggressor

200

necessarily provides the defender with a lucrative atomic target.
This ignores the fact that, in a delivered nuclear weapon itself,
the offense has an enormous concentration of force. The use of
nuclear weapons in limited wars might make it possible for the
aggressor to eliminate the existing forces of the defender and to
get the war over, reaching his limited objective before the defender
or his allies can mobilize new forces. Like all-out nuclear war it
puts a premium on surprise and forces in being rather than on
mobilization potential which is the area in which the West has an
advantage.

I am inclined to believe that most of those who rely on tactical
nuclear weapons as a substitute for disparities in conventional
forces have in general presupposed a cooperative Soviet attacker,
one who did not use atomic weapons himself. Here again is an
instance of Western-preferred Soviet strategies, this time applied
to limited war. Ironically, according to reports of Soviet tactical
exercises described in the last few years in the military newspaper.
The Red Star, atomic weapons are in general employed only by
the offense, the defender apparently employing Soviet-preferred
Western strategies. ^^ The symmetry of the optimism of East and
West here could be quite deadly.

Whether or not nuclear weapons favor the West in limited war,
there still remains the question of whether such limitations could
be made stable. Korea illustrated the possibility of a conventional
limited war which did not become nuclear, though fought in
the era of nuclear weapons. It remains to be seen whether there
are any equilibrium points between the use of conventional and
all-out weapons. In fact the emphasis on the gradualness of the
graduated deterrents may be misplaced. The important thing
would be to find some discontinuities if these steps are not to
lead too smoothly to general war. Nuclear limited war, simply
because of the extreme swiftness and unpredictability of its
moves, the necessity of delegating authority to local commanders,
and the possibility of sharp and sudden desperate reversals of
fortune, would put the greatest strain on the deterrent to all-out
thermonuclear war.

For this reason I believe that it would be appropriate to
emphasize the importance of expanding a conventional capability
realistically and, in particular, research and development in non-
nuclear modes of warfare. These have been financed by pitifully
small budgets. Yet I would conjecture that if one considers the
implications of modern surface-to-air missiles in the context of

201

conventional war in which the attacker has to make many sorties
and expose himself to recurring attrition, these weapons would
look ever so much better than they do when faced, for example,
with the heroic task of knocking down 99 percent of a wave of, say
one thousand nuclear bombers. Similarly, advances in anti-tank
wire-guided missiles and anti-personnel fragmentation weapons,
which have been mentioned from time to time in the press, might
help redress the current balance of East-West conventional forces
without, however, removing the necessity for spending more
money in procurement as well as research and development.

The interdependencies of limited and total war decisions
make it clear that the development of any powerful limited war
capability, and in particular a nuclear one, only underlines the
need, at the same time, for insuring retaliation against all-out
attack. An aggressor must constantly weigh the dangers of all-
out attack against the dangers of waiting, of not striking "all-
out." Sharp reversals in a limited war can increase the dangers
of waiting. But finally there is no question at this late date that
strategic deterrence is inadequate to answer limited provocation.

Strategic deterrence has other inadequacies besides its
limitations in connection with limited war. Some of these concern
air defense. The power to deter a rational all-out attack does not
relieve us of the responsibility for defending our cities in case
deterrence fails. It should be said at once that such a defense is not
a satisfactory substitute for deterring a carefully planned surprise
attack since defense against such an attack is extraordinarily
difficult. I know in fact of no high confidence way of avoiding
enormous damage to our cities in a war initiated by an aggressor
with a surprise thermonuclear attack. The only way of preventing
such damage with high confidence is to prevent the war. But if we
could obtain a leakproof air defense, many things would change.
A limited war capability, for example, would be unimportant.
Massive retaliation against even minor threats, since it exposed
us to no danger, might be credible. Deterring attack would also
not be very important. Of course if both sides had such defenses,
deterrence would not be feasible either, but this again would be
insignificant since strategic war would be relatively harmless — at
least to the targets on both sides if not to the attacking vehicles. It
is a curious paradox of our recent intellectual history that, among
the pioneers of both the balance of terror theory of automatic
deterrence and the small nuclear weapon theory of limited or
tactical war were the last true believers in the possibility of near

202

perfect defense — which would have made deterrence infeasible
and both it and the ability to fight limited war unimportant.
However, in spite of the periodic announcements of "technological
breakthroughs," the goal of emerging unscathed from a surprise
thermonuclear attack has gotten steadily more remote.

On the other hand, this does not mean that we can dispense
with the defense of cities. In spite of deterrence a thermonuclear
war could be tripped by accident or miscalculation. In this
case, particularly since the attack might be less well planned, a
combination of spoiling counterattacks and active and passive
defenses might limit the size of the catastrophe. It might mean,
for example, the difference between fifty million survivors and
a hundred and twenty million survivors, and it would be quite
wrong to dismiss this as an unimportant difference.

If strategic deterrence is not enough, is it really necessary
at all? Many sensitive and serious critics of Western defense
policy have expressed their deep dissatisfaction with the strategy
of deterrence. Moreover, since they have almost all assumed
a balance of terror making deterrence nearly effortless, their
dissatisfaction with deterrence might very well deepen if they
accept the view presented here, that deterrence is most difficult.
Distaste for the product should not be lessened by an increase in
its cost. I must confess that the picture of the world that I have
presented is unpleasant. Strategic deterrence will be hard. It
imposes some dangers of its own. In any case, though a keystone
of a defense policy, it is only a part, not the whole. The critics who
feel that deterrence is "bankrupt," to use the word of one of them,
sometimes say that we stress deterrence too much. I believe this
is quite wrong if it means that we are devoting too much effort to
protect our power to retaliate, but I think it quite right if it means
that we have talked too much of a strategic threat as a substitute
for many things it cannot replace. Mr. Kennan, for example,
rejects the bomb as salvation, but explicitly grants it a sorry value
as a deterrent. (In fact he grants it rather more than I since in his
policy of disengagement it seems that he would substitute a threat
something like that of massive retaliation for even conventional
American and English forces on the Continent.)

On the whole, I think the burden of the criticism of deterrence
has been the inadequacy of a thermonuclear capability and
frequently of, what is not really deterrence at all, the threat to strike
first. But it would be a fatal mistake to confuse the inadequacy
of strategic deterrence with its dispensability. Deterrence is not

203

dispensable. If the picture of the world I have drawn is rather
bleak, it could nonetheless be cataclysmically worse. Suppose
both the United States and the Soviet Union had the power to
destroy each others' retaliatory forces and society, given the
opportunity to administer the opening blow. In this case, the
situation would be something like the old-fashioned Western
gun duel. It would be extraordinarily risky for one side not to
attempt to destroy the other, or to delay doing so. Not only can
it emerge unscathed by striking first; this is the only way it can
have a reasonable hope of emerging at all. Such a situation is
clearly extremely unstable. On the other hand, if it is clear that the
aggressor too will suffer catastrophic damage in the event of his
aggression, he then has strong reason not to attack, even though
he can administer great damage. A protected retaliatory capability
has a stabilizing influence not only in deterring rational attack,
but also in offering every inducement to both powers to reduce
the chance of accidental detonation of war. Our own interest in
"fail-safe" responses for our retaliatory forces illustrates this. A
protected power to strike back does not come automatically, but
it can hardly be stressed too much that it is worth the effort.

There are many other goals for our foreign as well as our
military policy which have great importance: the strengthening of
the alliance and of the neutral powers, economic development of
the less advanced countries, negotiations to reduce the dangers of
deliberate or accidental outbreak, and some attempts to settle the
outstanding differences between the East and West. These other
objectives of military and foreign policy are important and many
of them are vital. But an unsentimental appraisal suggests no
sudden change in prospect and in particular no easy removal of
the basic East- West antagonisms. Short of some hard-to-manage
peaceful elimination of the basic antagonisms, or a vast and
successful program of disarmament, it would be irresponsible to
surrender the deterrent. But in fact progress in disarmament too
will be made easier if it is complemented by a defense against

VII. Deterrence, Accidents, and Disarmament

A deterrent strategy is aimed at a rational enemy. Without a
deterrent, general war is likely. With it, however, war might still
occur. This is one reason deterrence is only a part and not the
whole of a military and foreign policy.

204

In fact, there is a very unpleasant interaction. In order to
reduce the risk of a rational act of aggression, we are being forced
to undertake measures (increased alertness, dispersal, mobility)
which, to a smaller extent but still significantly, increase the
risk of an irrational or unintentional act of war. The accident
problem, which has occupied an increasingly prominent place
in newspaper headlines during the past year, is a serious one. It
would be a great mistake to dismiss the recent Soviet charges on
this subject as simply part of the war of nerves. In a clear sense
the great multiplication and spread of nuclear arms throughout
the world, the drastic increase in the degree of readiness of these
weapons, and the decrease in the time available for the decision
on their use must inevitably raise the risk of accident. Though
they were not in themselves likely to trigger misunderstanding,
the B-47 accidents this year at Sidi Slimane and at Florence, South
Carolina, and the recent Nike explosion (of which an Army officer
in the local command said, "A disaster which could not happen
did.") suggest the problem. And they are just the beginning.

There are many sorts of accidents that could happen. There
can be electronic or mechanical failures of the sort illustrated by
the B-47 and Nike mishaps; there can be aberrations of individuals,
perhaps, quite low in the echelon of command; and, finally, there
can be miscalculations on the part of governments as to enemy
intent and the meaning of ambiguous signals. (With the rising
noise level of alarms on the international scene and the shortening
of the time available for such momentous decisions, this possibility
becomes more real; with the widespread distribution of nuclear
weapons with separate national controls, it is possible that there
will be separate calculations of national interest. These could indi-
cate a cause for all-out war to some nation doing the calculating
which, from our standpoint, would be quite inadequate. That is,
from our standpoint, a "miscalculation.")

What I have said does not imply that all deterrent strategies
risk accident equally. The contrary is the case. One of the
principles of selecting a strategy should be to reduce the chance
of accident, wherever we can, without a corresponding increase
in vulnerability to a rational surprise attack. (The problem of
obtaining warning of a surprise attack, deciding on a response
and communicating the decision— which last is especially acute
for the mobile systems — would be very much easier if we did not
have to be concerned with both goals: to deter a rational act of war
and to reduce the chance of its happening by accident.) This is

205

the significance of the recently adopted "fail-safe" procedures for
launching SAC which came to the public notice in connection with
the U.N. debates last May. Such a procedure requires that bombers,
flushed by some serious yet not unambiguous warning, return to
base unless they are specifically directed to continue forward. If
the alarm is false, the bombers will return to base even if there is
a failure in radio communications. If the alarm was in response
to an actual attack and some radio communications should fail,
this failure would mean only a small percentage diminution of
the force going on to target. The importance of such a procedure
can be grasped in contrast with the alternative. The alternative
was to launch bombers on their way to target with instructions to
continue unless recalled. Here, in case of a false alarm and a failure
in communications, the single bomber or handful of bombers that
did not receive the message to return to base might, as a result
of this mistake, go forward by themselves to start the war. Of all
the many poor ways to start a war, this would be perhaps the
worst. Moreover, when one considers the many hundreds of
vehicles involved, the cumulative probability of accidental war
would rapidly approach certainty with repeated false alarms. Or
the planes would have to be kept grounded until evidence of an
attack was unambiguous — which would make these forces more
vulnerable and, hence, such an attack more probable. A fail-safe
procedure extends the period for final commitment.

While "fail-safe" or, as it is now less descriptively called,
"positive control" is of great importance, it by no means eliminates
the possibility of accident. While it can reduce the chance of
miscalculation by governments somewhat by extending the
period of final commitment, this possibility nonetheless remains.

The increased readiness of strategic forces affects the
disarmament issues and therefore our allies and the neutral
powers. Here it is important to recognize the obsolescence of
some of the principal policies we have enunciated before the U.N.
The Russians, exploiting an inaccurate United Press report which
suggested that SAC started en masse toward Russia in response
to frequent radar ghosts, cried out against these supposed
Arctic flights. The United States response and its sequels stated
correctly that such flights had never been undertaken except in planned
exercises — and moreover would not be undertaken in response to such
high false-alarm rate warnings. We pointed out the essential role of
quick response and a high degree of readiness in the protection of
the deterrent force. The nature of the fail-safe precaution was also
described.

206

We added, however, to cap the argument, that if the Russians
were really worried about surprise attack they would accept
the President's "open skies" proposal. This addition, however,
conceals an absurdity. Aerial photography would have its uses
in a disarmament plan— for example, to check an exchange of
information on the location of ground bases. However, so far as
surprise is concerned, the "open skies" plan would have direct
use only to discover attacks requiring much more lengthy, visible,
and unambiguous preparations than are likely today." The very
readiness of our own strategic force suggests a state of technology
which outmodes the "open skies" plan as a counter to surprise
attack. Not even the most advanced reconnaissance equipment
can disclose an intention from 40,000 feet. Who can say what the
men in the blockhouse of an ICBM base have in mind? Or, for
that matter, what is the final destination of training flights or fail-
safe flights starting over the Pacific or North Atlantic from staging
areas?

The actions that need to be taken on our own to deter attack
might usefully be complemented by bilateral arguments for
inspection and reporting and, possibly, limitation of arms and
of methods of operating strategic and naval air forces. But the
protection of retaliatory power remains essential; and the better
the protection, the smaller the burden placed on the agreement
to limit arms and modes of operation and to make them subject
to inspection. Relying on "open skies" alone to prevent surprise
would invite catastrophe and the loss of power to retaliate. Such
a plan is worthless for discovering a well prepared attack with
ICBMs or submarine-launched missiles or a routine mass training
flight whose destination could be kept ambiguous. A tremendous
weight of weapons could be delivered in spite of it.

Although it is quite hopeless to look for an inspection scheme
which would permit abandonment of the deterrent, this does not
mean that some partial agreement on inspection and limitation
might not help to reduce the chance of any sizable surprise attack.
We should explore the possibilities of agreements involving
limitation and inspection. But how we go about this will be
conditioned by our appreciation of the problem of deterrence
itself.

The critics of current policy who perceive the inadequacy
of the strategy of deterrence are prominent among those urging
disarmament negotiations, an end to the arms race, and a reduction
of tension. This is a paramount interest of some of our allies. The

207

balance of terror theory is the basis for some of the more light-
hearted suggestions: if deterrence is automatic, strategic weapons
on one side cancel those of the other, and it should be easy for
both sides to give them up. So James E. King, Jr., one of the most
sensible writers on the subject of limited war, suggests^' that
weapons needed for "unlimited" war are those which both sides
can most easily agree to abolish, simply because "neither side
can anticipate anything but disaster" from their use. "Isn't there
enough stability in the 'balance of terror'," he asks, "to justify our
believing that the Russians can be trusted — within acceptable
limits — to abandon the weapons whose 'utility is confined to the
threat or conduct of a war of annihilation'?"

Indeed if there were no real danger of a rational attack, then
accidents and the "n-th" country problem seem the only problems.
In fact, they are very prominent in the recent literature on the
subject of disarmament. As I have indicated, they are serious
problems and some sorts of limitation and inspection agreement
could diminish them. Almost everyone seems concerned with
the need to relax tension. However, relaxation of tension, which
everyone thinks is good, is not easily distinguished from relaxing
one's guard, which almost everyone thinks is bad. Relaxation,
like Miltown, is not an end in itself. Not all danger comes from
tension. The reverse relation, to be tense where there is danger, is
only rational. If there is to be any prospect of realistic and useful
agreement, we must reject the theory of automatic deterrence.
The size and degree of protection of our retaliatory forces in any
limitation arrangement would in good part determine the size of
the force that a violator would have to hide. If the agreed-on force
were small and vulnerable, no monitorable scheme would be
likely to be feasible. Most obviously "the abolition of the weapons
necessary in a general or 'unlimited' war" would offer the most
insuperable obstacles to an inspection plan since the violator
could gain an overwhelming advantage from the concealment of
even a few weapons. The need for a deterrent, in this connection
too, is ineradicable.

VIII. Summary

What can we say then, in sum, on the balance of terror theory
of automatic deterrence? It is a contribution to the rhetoric rather
than the logic of war in the thermonuclear age. In suggesting that
a carefully planned surprise attack can be checkmated almost

208

effortlessly, that in short we may resume our deep pre-Sputnik
sleep, it is wrong and its nearly universal acceptance is terribly
dangerous. Though deterrence is not enough in itself, it is vital.
There are two principal points.

First, even if we can deter general war by a strenuous and
continuing effort, this will not be the whole of a military, much
less a foreign policy! Such a policy would not of itself remove
the danger of accidental outbreak or limit the damage in case
deterrence failed, nor would it be at all adequate for crises on
the periphery. Moreover, to achieve deterrent balance will entail
some new risks requiring insurance — in any case, some foreign
policy reorientation.

Second, deterring general war in both the early and late Sixties
will be hard at best, and hardest both for ourselves and our allies
wherever we use forces based near the enemy.

A generally useful way of concluding a grim argument of this
kind would be to affirm that we have the resources, intelligence
and courage to make the correct decisions. That is, of course, the
case. And there is a good chance that we will do so. But perhaps, as
a small aid toward making such decisions more likely, we should
contemplate the possibility that they may not be made. They are
hard, involve sacrifice, are affected by great uncertainties, concern
matters in which much is altogether unknown and much else must
be hedged by secrecy; and, above all, they entail a new image of
ourselves in a world of persistent danger. It is by no means certain
that we shall meet the test.

ENDNOTES - Wohlstetter - The Delicate Balance of Terror

1. 1 want to thank C. J. Hitch, M. W. Hoag, W. W. Kaufmann,
A. W. Marshall, H. S. Rowen, and W. W. Taylor for suggestions in
preparation of this article.

2. George F. Kennan, "A Chance to Withdraw Our Troops in
Europe," Harper's Magazine, February 1958, p. 41.

3. P. M. S. Blackett, Atomic Weapons and East-West Relations,
Cambridge Univ. Press, 1956, p. 32.

4. Joseph Alsop, "The New Balance of Power," Encounter, May
1958, p. 4. It should be added that, since these lines were written,
Mr. Alsop's views have altered.

209

5. The New York Times, September 6, 1958, p. 2.

6. This is not a new error: in an interview with the press on
December 3, 1941, Air Chief Marshal Sir Robert Brooke-Popham,
Commander-in-Chief, Far East, for the British forces stated, "There
are clear indications that Japan does not know which way to turn.
Tojo is scratching his head." As Japan did not have a definite
policy to follow, irrevocably, step by step, said Sir Robert, "there
is a reassuring state of uncertainty in Japan." O. Dowd Gallagher,
Action in the East, Doubleday, p. 94.

7. General Pierre M. Gallois, "A French General Analyzes
Nuclear-Age Strategy," ReaUtes, November, 1958, pp. 19-22, 70-
71; "Nuclear Aggression and National Suicide," The Reporter,
September 18, 1958, pp. 23-26.

8. See endnote 12.

9. Blackett, op. cit., p. 34.

10. Ibid., p. 53.

11. See, for example, "NATO, A Critical Appraisal," by
Gardner Patterson and Edgar S. Furniss, Jr., Princeton University
Conference on NATO, Princeton, New Jersey, June 1957, p. 32:
"Although no one pretended to know, the hypothesis that one-
third of the striking force of the United States Strategic Air
Command was in the air at all times was regarded by most as
reasonable."

12. General Gallois argues that, while alliances will offer no
guarantee, "a small number of bombs and a small number of
carriers suffice for a threatened power to protect itself against
atomic destruction." {ReaUtes, op. cit., p. 71.) His numerical
illustrations give the defender some 400 underground launching
sites {ibid., p. 22 and The Reporter, op. cit., p. 25) and suggest
that their elimination would require between 5,000 and 25,000
missiles— which is "more or less impossible" — and that in any
case the aggressor would not survive the fallout from his own
weapons. Whether these are large numbers of targets from the
standpoint of the aggressor will depend on the accuracy, yield

210

and reliability of offense weapons as well as the resistance of the
defender's shelters and a number of other matters not specified
in the argument. General Gallois is aware that the expectation
of survival depends on distance even in the ballistic missile age
and that our allies are not so fortunate in this respect. Close-in
missiles have better bomb yields and accuracies. Moreover,
manned aircraft — with still better yields and accuracies — can
be used by an aggressor here since warning of their approach is
very short. Suffice it to say that the numerical advantage General
Gallois cites is greatly exaggerated. Furthermore, he exaggerates
the destructiveness of the retaliatory blow against the aggressor's
cities by the remnants of the defender's missile force — even
assuming the aggressor would take no special measures to protect
his cities. But particularly for the aggressor — who does not lack
warning — a civil defense program can moderate the damage
done by a poorly organized attack. Finally, the suggestion that the
aggressor would not survive the fallout from his own weapons is
simply in error. The rapid decay fission products which are the
major lethal problem in the locality of a surface-burst weapon are
not a serious difficulty for the aggressor. The amount of the slow
decay products, strontium-90 and cesium-137, in the atmosphere
would increase considerably more than the amounts that have
been produced by the rather large number of megatons already
detonated in the course of testing by the three nuclear powers. This
might for example, if nothing were done to counter it, increase by
many times the incidence of such relatively rare diseases as bone
cancer and leukemia. However, such a calamity, implying an
increase of, say, 20,000 deaths per year for a nation of 200,000,000
is of an entirely different order from the catastrophe involving
tens of millions of deaths, which General Gallois contemplates
elsewhere. And there are measures that might reduce even this
effect drastically. (See The RAND Corporation Report R-322-RC,
Report on a Study of Non-Military Defense, July 1, 1958.)

13. 1 am indebted to an unpublished paper of Mr. Constantin
Melnik for this reference.

14. Aerial reconnaissance, of course, could have an indirect
utility here for surveying large areas to determine the number
and location of observation posts needed to provide more timely

211

15. James E. King, Jr., "Arms and Man in the Nuclear-Rocket
Era," The New Republic, September 1, 1958.

212

Excerpts on "Missile Gap" from

General Comments on Senator Kennedy's

National Security Speeches (circa 1960)

Albert Wohlstetter

Excerpted from Albert Wohlstetter, "Some General Com-
ments on Senator [John F.] Kennedy's National Security
Speeches," circa 1960, available from Hoover Institution
Archives, Albert and Roberta Wohlstetter Papers, Writ-
ings, Box 148, Folder 10. Courtesy of the Wohlstetter
Estate.

The defense speeches are, on the whole, sound. The sense of
what Mr. Kennedy has to say on national defense can be improved
in detail and conceptually (for example, the analysis of the so-
called missile gap), but the principal problem they present is that
there are inconsistencies between the national defense speeches
and the speeches on disarmament.

Discussion:

The defense speeches on the whole are sound in empha-
sizing:

1. That there are serious deficiencies in our national defense
posture both for central war and for theater warfare. (The
emphasis on conventional forces for theater is especially good as
is the emphasis on a second-strike capability for central war and
the mention, however brief, of the need for active and passive
defense of our cities.)

2. That the expenditure of several billion dollars a year more
on national defense is necessary and can be made without great
sacrifice.

3. That the purpose of our military policy (that is, our national
defense) is peaceful.

4. That the likelihood of concluding an arms agreement
with the Russians is increased by a strengthening of our military
posture — "we arm to parley."

There are some inaccuracies and unclarities in the defense
speeches themselves, and in particular there are several points
at which their most important insights are lost. For example.

213

the missile gap speech in 1958 recognizes that retaliatory power
depends on not just the number of offense vehicles on both sides
but also the active and passive defenses of both sides. However,
other parts of this speech and other speeches suggest that the
problem is one of simply a disparity in the number of vehicles and
is soluble completely by an increase in the number of our Polaris
and Minutemen. The name "missile gap" itself was suggested
by an anticipated difference between the number of missiles
in our force and the number of missiles in the Russian force in
the early 60' s. There are several things that are wrong with the
notion of missile gap, some of which are summarized in another
attachment.

The Concept of the "Missile Gap"

The phrase "missile gap" came into use to express the
anticipated difference between the number of missiles anticipated
for the Russian force and the number programmed for our own
in the early 60' s. It is evident that the more rapid growth of the
Russian missile force is connected with some of our defense
troubles, but nonetheless the notion of missile gap has many
deficiencies for the purposes of describing what that trouble is.

1. The missile gap is the result of a direct comparison between
pre-attack forces of the Soviet Union and pre-attack forces of
the United States. In this case, missile forces. Similar direct
comparisons of pre-attack forces figured in earlier Congressional
and Administration debates, for example, an earlier flurry about
an expected gap between the number of Russian heavy bombers
and American heavy bombers led to an increase in our B-52
program. The Congressional critics have, especially until very
recently, compared pre-attack numbers of U.S. bombers with pre-
attack numbers of Russian bombers or pre-attack numbers of U.S.
missiles with Russian missiles, etc. The Administration answers
at first consisted in simply broadening the basis of comparison,
for example, to the total of pre-attack missiles, and bombers
(medium and heavy), in the U.S. force with the analogous total in
the Russian force.

2. Strictly speaking, neither the critics nor the administration
respondents were in point when they matched pre-attack forces
to demonstrate either that there was a deficiency or that there was

214

not. The problem so far as deterrence is concerned is to assure
retaliation which, of course, is a matter of a second-strike capability,
and it is possible for the victim of aggression to have a larger pre-
attack force than the aggressor and little or nothing to strike back
with after the aggression. This is so if his forces are sufficiently
concentrated, soft, easy to target, lacking in penetration capability,
etc. And on the other hand it is possible for the reverse to be true.
In fact the administration program for the 60's is inadequate to
assure deterrence, but an analysis that shows this has to be subtler
than a mere matching of pre-attack capabilities for both sides. The
administration in this last year changed its line of response to its
critics, and instead of saying that while we would have fewer
missiles we would have as many or more missiles as bombers in
total, it said correctly that matching is irrelevant. And it asserted
that there would be no "deterrence gap." There is nothing wrong
with the logic of this last argument. It is simply factually in error.
To demonstrate it requires an analysis of the interactions of
Russian and U.S. forces assuming various reasonable strategies
for both sides and considering warning and response time, the
problems of command and control, and the cumulative problems
of keeping a relatively accident-safe peacetime operation of the
force, [and keeping] the capabilities to survive the opening blow,
to decide on the transition from peace to war, and to penetrate
active and passive defenses.

The gap concept simply ignores the complexity of the problem
and was open to counter by the increased sophistication of the
administration's response.

3. The adjective in "missile gap" suggests that the problem
arrived with the advent of long-range ballistic missiles, and the
noun "gap" suggests that it is a transient phenomenon. This is also
suggested in the first item that we have to get successfully through
the gap. In fact the problem of deterrence became a difficult one
before the advent of the ballistic missile and stemmed basically
from the failure to protect our strategic force as distinct from
simply increasing it. (In fact viewing it as a problem of matching
pre-strike forces encourages a continuance of this bad habit.)
Finally, the gap notion, in suggesting that there is a trouble period
of more or less definite short duration, is excessively cheery. A
"gap" would seem by definition to have something solid on the
other side. Unfortunately there is not. It will take continuing
ingenuity and effort in light of changing technology to get a stable
deterrent. In some respects, far from getting easier in the late 60' s

215

as some people think, deterrence, though achievable and critically
important, will get harder.

4. The near side as well as the far side of the gap raises
problems which are best avoided. They are of two sorts. If the
vulnerability should come close enough to make it hard to remedy
in time, there would be valid security and policy questions in
focusing on this near border of the gap. The second problem is
related. In speeches which mention the exact year [the gap is to
begin], one tends successfully to put off the date at which the
gap is supposed to start. So the missile gap speech of 1958 said
without qualification "the gap will begin in 1960." The Investment
for Peace speech delivered in 1960 qualifies this by suggesting
that the matter will "become critical in 1961, 1962 or 1963." For
such reasons it seems more sensible to talk about a less precisely
delimited period beginning with the time our actions can take
effect and continuing indefinitely to require ingenuity and effort.

216

On the Genesis of Nuclear Strategy:
Letter to Michael Howard (1968)

Albert Wohlstetter

Excerpted from Albert Wohlstetter, On the Genesis of
Nuclear Strategy, unpublished, expanded version of
Wohlstetter' s unpublished November 6, 1968, letter
to Michael Howard, with additional materials and
commentary by James Digby and Arthur Steiner, and
a note by Michael Howard, revised circa April 1986,
available from Hoover Institution Archives, Albert and
Roberta Wohlstetter Papers, Writings, Box 187, Folder
22. Courtesy of the Wohlstetter Estate, the Digby Estate,
and Arthur Steiner.

November 6, 1968

1550 North State Parkway

Chicago, Illinois 60610

Michael Howard
All Souls College
Oxford, England

Dear Michael:

Let me begin with some comments on a few specific points
in your paper on the history of nuclear strategy. 1 shall deal with
the timing and logical content of concepts and doctrine, the role
of physicists, "academic" historians and social scientists, and the
then "unacademic" systems analysts whose work used actual
military deployments, plans and operations; also with the actual
relations of nuclear forces in the 1950s. My comments concern not
only those concepts and strategies in whose development 1 was
personally engaged, but also some earlier history that is traceable
in the Special Collection on atomic scientists in the Harper
Collection at the University of Chicago and similar collections at
the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission.^ 1 shall be using my as yet
unpublished lecture notes on the history of nuclear strategy — and
especially the notes relevant to the statements in your paper about

217

how nuclear weapons were seen to affect and how they affected
the stable deterrence of war; and the genesis of the first-strike,
second-strike distinction.

First, your pages 4ff:^ You contrast the lay notion that
nuclear weapons would transform the entire nature of war with
the judgment of professionals:". . . for the professional they
made remarkably little difference. . . ." You suggest that the
professional, including not only the military but also scientists
who had long experience of military planning, held the latter
view, and cite Blackett and Bush as examples.^ Then you contrast
a few "academics" who were thinking ahead of what you assume
to have been the state of the art for the ten years following the
initiation of planning in NATO at the end of the 1940s.

However, the very first contrast made — that between the
professional and the layman— will not sustain examination; and
the state of the art in the 1950s was not what you suggest. The
physicists connected with the Manhattan Project (including some
fitting your description as experienced with military planning)
were the first to see that nuclear weapons made a great differ-
ence — though their understanding was understandably deficient.
The "difference" made is actually multiple and complex. Some
differences were critical much earlier than you suggest. NATO
plans in 1949 and later did not recognize the impending technical
environment in which they would operate in the 1950s. Finally,
academic social scientists and historians, like Viner, Brodie, and
Fox,* did indeed have important insights in 1945 and 1946, but
they did not foresee the possibility that nuclear attacks on nuclear
strategic forces raised an entirely new order of problem requiring
a major distinction between "first-strike" and "second-strike"
forces. Indeed, in some respects, they were even further from
seeing the problem than the physicists — who caught inconsistent
glimpses of it.

As my brief talk at Oxford indicated, it was mainly those rival
institutions who didn't have the bomb at the war's end (such as
the Navy, the ground Army — and the Russians) who then said it
made little difference. And politicians and professionals associated
with these bombless ones said the same. Military professionals
connected with the Army Air Corps, and those concerned with
strategic bombing in particular took an opposite view. (The War
Department public statements uneasily tried to bridge its air and
ground advocates' views.)

218

The physicists connected with the Manhattan Project at
first almost unanimously held that the bomb changed things
completely. Item 1 in the four-point "Creed" of the Federation of
American Scientists read : " 1 . The bomb is a revolutionary weapon. "
But then after 1946 these scientists began to associate themselves
with one side or another in the factional disputes. The majority
gradually reversed the absolutist position they had previously
taken that there was no defense against nuclear weapons, that it
was "one world or none."' But this was after the end of 1946 when
the Russians turned down the Baruch Plan and it was clear that
there was not going to be one world. The physicists then looked
more soberly at the "many-world" alternative to none. For the
first half of the 1950s, in fact, the majority faction of physicists
swung to the opposite of their first extreme. Vannevar Bush,
whose 1949 views you cite, illustrates perfectly both the initial
position and the change. His memoranda* on September 30, 1944,
stated that nuclear weapons were of world-shaking importance,
that they would soon place every population center in the world
at the mercy of the nation that struck first, etc.

Let me expand a little on the initial position of the natural
scientists and engineers connected with the Manhattan Project.
And then let me treat the views of Viner, Brodie, and Fox in
relation to those of the Manhattan Project scientists. I think
it is clear that each of these groups had vital insights. Neither,
however, can genuinely be said to have understood "the whole
concept of a stable balance of second-strike forces" (your p. 5)^ in
the plain sense in which the phrase is used today and in which it
was defined. Moreover, when looked at historically it is possible
to see why, for all the honors they deserve, they were not likely to
have foreseen the relations of forces that called forth the distinc-
tion in the early 1950s.

The Manhattan Project Scientists

A good place to begin with the early views of the atomic
scientists is the "Prospectus on Nucleonics" by a committee
headed by Zay Jeffries that included Enrico Fermi, James Franck,
T. R. Hogness, R. S. Mulliken, R. S. Stone, and C. A. Thomas. It
was dated September 1944. It contains several ideas that became
commonplace immediately after Hiroshima.*

The first was the recognition of the enormous increase in
destructiveness enabled by nuclear weapons, and, coupled

219

with this recognition, the insight that simply overmatching an
adversary's bombs is not strictly in point.

A nation, or even a political group, given the opportu-
nity to start aggression by a sudden use of nuclear de-
struction devices, will be able to unleash a "blitzkrieg"
infinitely more terrifying than that of 1939-40. A sudden
blow of this kind might literally wipe out even the larg-
est nation — or at least all its production centers — and de-
cide the issue on the first day of the war. The weight of
the weapons of destruction required to deliver this blow
will be infinitesimal compared to that used up on a pres-
ent day heavy bombing raid. . . .

The second was the idea of the prospect of nuclear retaliation as, it
is to be hoped, something that might paralyze an aggressor.

The most that an independent American nucleonic re-
armament can achieve is the certainty that a sudden total
devastation of New York or Chicago can be answered
the next day by an even more extensive devastation of
the cities of the aggressor, and the hope that the fear of
such a retaliation will paralyze the aggressor.

On both counts, the Jeffries Committee deserve very early credit.
Yet, if one examines the statements closely, both analytically and
in their historical context, some essential limitations emerge.

First, like almost everyone else for years to come, members
of the Jeffries Committee were thinking primarily of production
centers and cities as the natural targets for nuclear attack.
Your quotation from Vannevar Bush in 1949 (and Bush's 1944
memoranda as well) display the same presumption: "They could
undoubtedly devastate the cities and the war potential. . . ." For a
good many reasons, some of which I have described elsewhere,'
the notion was ingrained very early that an atomic weapon is
essentially a weapon of "mass destruction" or "terror" to be used
as the Americans used it at Hiroshima. Eugene Rabinowitch,
the editor of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and two other
physicists from the Metallurgical Laboratories in Chicago wrote
that "Atomic bombs are weapons used only against large cities
and industrial centers. Therefore, if both sides in a conflict have
enough atomic bombs to wipe out each other's cities, they are in

220

approximately equal position, even if the one has three times more
bombs than the other." {Life, October 29, 1945, p. 46.) The famous
Franck Report, which was dated June 11, 1945, proceeded on the
same assumption: "Atomic bombs containing a larger quantity of
active material but still weighing less than a ton may be expected
to be available within ten years which could destroy over ten
square miles of a city. A nation able to assign 10 tons of atomic
explosives for the preparation of a sneak attack on this country
can then hope to achieve the destruction of all industry and most
of the population in an area from 500 square miles upwards."
(Signed by J. Franck, D. J. Hughes, J. J. Nickson, E. Rabinowitch, G.
T. Seaborg, J. C. Stearns, and L. Szilard.)^" Whether cities were the
only targets or just the preeminent ones, phrases like "weapons
for mass destruction" came to be used as synonyms for "atomic
weapons." So they entered the language and so they continue to
color our thought, even though we have long since come to see the
critical importance of other targets quite detached from masses of
people. As might be expected, Oppenheimer in 1945 summarized
with characteristic eloquence the essentially universal view of an
atomic weapon: "Surprise and... terror are as intrinsic to it as are
the fissionable nuclei. "^^

Oppenheimer' s understanding had been formed in the
circumstances of the original use of the weapon. The Interim
Committee and the Scientific Panel, of which Oppenheimer was
a member, were seeking as a target "a vital war plant employing
a large number of workers and closely surrounded by workers'
houses. "^^ As was not infrequently the case in the strategic bombing
debate between the wars, there was a certain ambivalence about
the purpose of destroying "closely surrounding" civilian workers
and their houses in addition to the "vital war plant." The flow of
products from a war plant, however "vital," supported the war
only by way of a pipeline of material to the fighting. Interrupting
the material flow would reduce stocks and have an indirect and
delayed effect. So also for the plant workers taken simply as a
factor of production. But the sudden act of annihilating the plant
and the workers could shock and inspire terror and so have a
direct and immediate effect on the popular and governmental will
to continue the war. Standard doctrine of strategic bombing, both
English and American, stressed not only the destruction of war-
supporting industry, but also the weakening of an adversary's
will to resist. Though the Interim Committee and the Scientific
Panel agreed that "the United States ... could not concentrate on a
civilian area," it chose a war plant closely surrounded by workers'

221

houses "to make as profound a psychological impression on as
many of the inhabitants as possible," to administer "the maximum
surprise shock."

Surprise at Hiroshima had then a function quite different
from its role in surprise attack on nuclear forces. It reduced the
probability that the active defenses would be alerted and the
single unescorted plane carrying the A-bomb intercepted. But
even more important, since delivery could have been assured by
other devices— for example, by an escort of hundreds of planes —
surprise was an intrinsic element in the terror and shock aimed at
and achieved. It is easy to see why terror, and surprise in relation
to terror, were seen not only by prominent members of the
Scientific Panel, but also by the Manhattan Project physicists and
by a wider public, as the essentials after Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The A-bomb was preeminently a weapon to be used against
population centers or against industry embedded in population
centers.

That this was an almost universal view of the Manhattan
Project physicists I can confirm on the basis of an examination of
hundreds of their statements made from 1944 to 1946. This view
led to other consequences I cannot elaborate on in this letter. For
example, it displaced the matching of weapons against weapons
with an equally mechanical numerical matching of bombs
against cities. This in turn led to the stereotypes of "overkill" in
which numbers or total yield of bombs are compared with total
population (now usually the population of the world). And it led
natural and social scientists to take degree of urbanization as the
measure of a country's vulnerability. In 1945 and 1946 this was
taken to imply the intrinsic disadvantage to the United States in
an arms race with the Soviet Union; and when after 1946 physicists
began to think of defense as an alternative to world government,
they thought of defending cities and began by talking especially
of one most costly and implausible measure — namely to outrace
bomb stockpiles by multiplying and dispersing cities.

However, what is essential for this letter is the way their view
of the bomb as preeminently a city-destroyer blinkered them as
to the possibilities of using it to destroy strategic nuclear forces.
Perhaps the most revealing testimony in this respect is that of the
Nobel Laureate Irving Langmuir.^^ I mentioned it in my talk at
Oxford. He pictures four stages in an arms race:

222

1. We alone have atomic bombs. We are then secure at
that time. 2. Other nations also have atomic bombs, but
they haven't enough to destroy all our cities; but we have
enough to destroy all of theirs. We are still relatively se-
cure, and nobody is likely to start an attack under those
conditions. 3. Two or more nations have enough bombs
to destroy all cities, perhaps 10,000 bombs of the kind
that we have now. That will probably come in an arma-
ment race. Retaliation, however, would be expected and
that would be a deterring factor, but perhaps not deci-
sive.

As was mentioned yesterday, and I think discussed by
General Groves, 40,000 people might be wiped out in the
United States by an attack of that kind, and it would not
help us much to destroy 40,000,000 people in the nation
of attack. . . .

There is, however, a fourth stage which would automati-
cally come sooner or later in any unlimited armament
race. We can confidently assume that there are going to
be discoveries made in this field. They may be made 4 to
5 years hence. They may be made 10 or 15 years hence,
but it is almost certain that we will have atomic bombs
a thousand times as powerful as those that now exist by
means that are now undiscovered.

It could be done by a cheaper means of production.
Instead of producing 10,000 bombs, it is conceivable
that by cheaper means of construction you could have
300,000 bombs.

That would be enough to treat every square mile in the
United States the way Hiroshima was. There would then
be no retaliation. There wouldn't be 60 percent of the
people left; there might be 2 percent of the people left,
and under those conditions you can see what happens
in the world.

In short, so fixed was the notion that cities or production centers
were the primary targets for nuclear weapons that Langmuir could
only foresee nuclear damage to nuclear retaliatory forces when
there would be enough bombs to cover the entire country — and so
inevitably, as a by-product, nuclear strike forces too! The 300,000
bomb calculation is quite typical of the gross computations of the
time. Langmuir took the 10 square mile damage area sometimes^*
roughly estimated for Hiroshima and, assuming square bombs.

223

divided it into the 3 million square mile area of the United States.
A good many of Blackett's calculations in his first book are of the
same order of precision.

This suggests some limitations on the physicists' under-
standing of the problems of retaliation and its virtues. If, in fact,
nuclear weapons to all intents and purposes were usable only
against cities and industry, nuclear retaliatory forces would be
intrinsically quite safe. Effortlessly safe, since they wouldn't
be attacked. Retaliation would be assured. There would be,
essentially, no distinction between striking first and striking
second (and therefore no need for a first-strike, second-strike
distinction.) And this automatically suggests, especially today,
the prospect of deterrence. And, especially today, this doesn't
seem the worst of all possible worlds. To us, it suggests at least
a limited but important kind of stability. However, it would be a
mistake to read our views into the writings of the physicists at the
time. In fact, the Jeffries Report didn't think much of "the hope
that the fear of such a retaliation will paralyze the aggressor."
It went on to say, "The whole history of mankind teaches that
this is a very uncertain hope, and that accumulated weapons of
destruction 'go off sooner or later, even if this means a senseless
mutual destruction." The Jeffries Committee, then, uttered one
of the earlier versions of the apocalyptic argument about the
inevitability of nuclear war through some irrational act: "sooner
or later." (Observe that Langmuir, too, refers to the deterring
prospect of retaliation, but without enthusiasm.)

Moreover, in between the two paragraphs [of the Jeffries
report] I have cited earlier, which drew the picture of a nuclear
war as a sequence in which an aggressor destroyed the cities
and production centers of his adversary, who in turn inflicted
a similar mass destruction on the aggressor, the authors of the
report included a fascinating analogy of the nuclear dilemma with
the situation of two men equipped with machine guns in a room
of 100 X 100 feet. The first to attack would not only destroy the
other but, provided he attacked soon enough, emerge unscathed.
Here the difference between striking first and striking second is
all important, and there is an enormous incentive to preempt, a
maximum of instability. (The close machine gun duel analogy has
been attributed to Eugene Wigner^^ and used by other physicists
as well.)

The Jeffries Report, then, contains side by side two incompatible
pictures of the revolution wrought by nuclear weapons. In the
one picture, striking first is of no advantage, since the other side

224

inevitably could retaliate in kind. In the other picture, striking first
is decisive, since neither side could retaliate. These incompatible
pictures were not seen to be incompatible. Each existed, so to speak,
by itself. And, by itself, neither would indicate any urgent need
for a first-strike, second-strike distinction of the kind that grew
out of the Base Study. ^*' Neither picture called for basic choices
and difficult efforts in the design and construction of a nuclear
force specifically to survive nuclear attacks.

If we were to use the latter distinction, we might say that,
in the one picture of the nuclear world, neither side could have
a capacity for striking second; in the other picture of the nuclear
world, with both sides directing their attacks on cities, each side
with nuclear weapons had a capacity for "striking second," that
is, retaliating against the other automatically. However, that is to
use the words quite differently from the way they were defined
when I introduced the distinction at the start of the 1950s. There
the capacity to strike second plainly referred to the ability of a nuclear
force to strike back after the force itself had been subject to nuclear attack.
To find it urgent to make the distinction, one had to perceive both
that it was possible and useful to get a second-strike capability and
that it was neither inevitable nor easy. In a sense, the Manhattan
Project physicists missed the target on both sides, as the Jeffries
Report and many other documents illustrate. The world of the
two close machine gunners missed it on the left by failing to see
the measure of stability that might be brought by making even
sudden attack highly risky. And a world in which one nuclear
country would open a war with a nuclear attack only on a second
nuclear country's cities and production centers missed it on the
right by making nuclear retaliation automatic, or a minor problem.
Surprise and striking early were vital in the first world; they were
secondary in the second world of terror bombing of cities.

The fascinating thing is that these two worlds existed side by
side without jostling, not only in the Jeffries Report, but for more
than two years following, in the statements of the Manhattan
Project physicists. In nuclear weapons, [as noted above, Robert
Oppenheimer said] in 1945, "the elements of surprise and of
terror are as intrinsic to it as are the fissionable nuclei." But if the
element of terror were primary, the element of surprise would be
important only insofar as it seconded the shock of terror visited on
the population attacked. A city nuclear attack, unlike the surprise
at Pearl Harbor which the physicists frequently cited, would
ignore direct military targets, except as incidents or by-product.

225

It might destroy war industry and so prevent mobilization. But it
would not prevent an already mobilized strategic force, separate
from the victim's own cities, from retaliating against the attacker's
cities and war-supporting industry. The temptation to aggression
is then hard to see. "They are weapons," said Oppenheimer,
"of aggression, of surprise, and of terror." There was a latent
contradiction in the physicists' view.

It is this contradiction that Jacob Viner observed. It is easy for
us to see it today. It was by no means easy then. Viner deserves
great credit. By the same token, the physicists whose lack in
this respect Viner observed nonetheless deserve high honors
for having generated some of the basic issues and above all for
having recognized that nuclear weapons were revolutionary. It
is not, after all, surprising that they understood only a small part
of what this revolution meant. They did not see that if nuclear
forces were, as they assumed, safe from nuclear attack, surprise
was by definition of little advantage. Neither did they pursue
the line of analysis suggested by the machine gunners in a small
room. The analogy is notable precisely because in it the gunners
are not safe and there is no distinction between the safety of the
"population" and the retaliatory force. The scattered insights of
the Manhattan Project physicists did not penetrate any significant
distance into the possibility that nuclear forces themselves were
not easily made safe from one another, and that in their case being
surprised might be fatal. However, Viner and the other social
scientists and historians in the late 1940s did not see this either,
and in fact they were in some ways further from seeing it than the
physicists because they followed only the "unattacked-retaliatory-
force" branch of the physicists' thought, with its implicit relative
optimism.

The Social Scientists and Historians

Viner' s extraordinary paper on "The Implications of the Atomic
Bomb for International Relations" took off from the physicists'
assumptions that nuclear weapons were city-destroyers, but
rejected their apocalyptic conclusion— since

the atomic bomb, unlike battleships, artillery, airplanes,
and soldiers, is not an effective weapon against its own
kind ... it does not much matter strategically how much
more efficient the atomic bomb can become provided

226

superiority in efficiency affects chiefly the fineness of
the dust to which it reduces the city upon which it is
dropped. . . . There seems to be universal agreement that
under atomic-bomb warfare there would be a new and
tremendous advantage in being first to attack and that
the atomic bomb therefore gives a greater advantage
than ever to the aggressor. I nevertheless remain uncon-
vinced. . . . What difference will it then make whether it
was country A which had its cities destroyed at 9 a.m.
and country B which had its cities destroyed at 12 a.m.,
or the other way round?

Viner read his paper on November 16, 1945.^^ He must have
written it only a couple of months after he first heard of the bomb
when it exploded over Hiroshima, and on all counts this paper, to
which Brodie and Fox acknowledged their indebtedness, must be
seen as one of the landmarks in the history of the development of
strategic doctrine.^*

What is more, Viner not only detected one crucial strand of
inconsistency in the strategic thinking of the Manhattan Project
scientists; he brought to the political issues a kind of sophisticated
awareness of the character of the international system which was
quite beyond the physicists. His remarks on the dim prospects
of early world government are the sort of thing that one might
have expected from a distinguished student of both international
relations and international economics. And Bernard Brodie
and William Fox, and several others of like training, made very
important similar points, points that were very rare at the time.
There are many other matters of interest in Viner. Viner' s is the
first, and in some ways still the best, statement of Pierre Gallois's
position on the stabilizing effect of the spread of nuclear weapons.^'
Wrong, I think. Its error is, of course, pardonable in November
1945; it flowed from the fundamental assumption of great stability
because of the automatic or nearly automatic invulnerability of
strategic forces, and from a belief that they would therefore be
"equalizers," restoring in fact essential features of the 18th and
19th century international system.

Viner' s insights were limited by the scant information he
had derived from the physicists. He was aware of this and said
specifically that he was working with "a few facts and a few
surmises about the military effectiveness and the cost of atomic
bombs": information that he deliberately exposed to his audience.

227

including many of the most famous physicists associated with the
Manhattan Project.

The bomb has a minimum size, and in this size it is, and
will remain, too expensive — or too scarce, whether ex-
pensive or not — to be used against minor targets. Its tar-
gets therefore must be primarily cities, and its military
effectiveness must reside primarily in its capacity to de-
stroy urban population and productive facilities. Under
atomic bomb warfare, the soldier in the army would be
safer than his wife and children in their urban home.

In this set of assumptions and in drawing inferences from them,
Viner observed one inconsistency of the physicists but shared
some inconsistencies with the physicists. He assumed that the
bomb would be too expensive for even the superpowers to
acquire enough of them to use against targets other than cities.
Yet he assumed that they would be cheap enough so that even
small powers could acquire them in substantial numbers. (In fact,
the physicists sometimes explicitly talked of the bomb as cheap,
especially when they were stressing the dangers of the spread of
nuclear weapons.) But the principal upshot of Viner's analysis
was to suggest that nuclear weapons would, in the nature of the
case, be rather stabilizing, that they would reduce the importance
of surprise and restore military significance to the weaker
countries.

Viner has one sentence that refers in passing to the possibility
of atomic or other attack on nuclear forces. But his perfunctory
dismissal of this possibility is entirely characteristic and displays
as much as anything else how far he was from recognizing the
essentials of surprise nuclear attack. He says, "No country
possessing atomic bombs will be foolish enough to concentrate
either its bomb-production and bomb-throwing facilities or its
bomb stockpiles at a small number of spots vulnerable to atomic
bomb or other modes of attack." In fact, a policy of simply
multiplying the number of points containing these nuclear
facilities could hardly hope to match the means of destroying these
facilities, among other reasons because such simple multiplication
if very extensive is very costly. However, if Viner did not think
seriously of the problem of nuclear attack on nuclear forces at that
time, it is hard to find anyone else who did.

228

Brodie starts from Viner's notion that since a nuclear exchange
would be directed at cities and industry, the element of surprise is
not as important as the physicists assumed. In fact, he cites Viner
as having first suggested and elaborated the idea (see pp. 73, 74 of
The Absolute Weapon) }° And, as he says, his paper is plainly in debt
to Viner in numerous ways. Like Viner, he is thinking of nuclear
weapons as being primarily directed at cities and industry, and
for much the same reason.

The enormous concentration of power in the individu-
al bomb, irreducible below a certain high limit except
through deliberate and purposeless wastage of effi-
ciency, is such as to demand for the full realization of
that power targets in which the enemy's basic strength
is comparably concentrated. Thus, the city is a made-to-
order target, and the degree of urbanization of a country
furnishes a rough index of its relative vulnerability to
the atomic bomb (p. 99).

His First Postulate, in the preceding chapter, reads that:

The power of the present bomb is such that any city in the
world can be effectively destroyed by one to ten bombs .
. . (p. 24, emphasis added).

Any damage done to a retaliatory capability he thinks of as a by-
product of the nuclear attack which the aggressor would have
directed at cities. This is plain on pp. 88 and 89, but at many
points elsewhere. And he is thinking of the problem of retaliation
essentially as that of maintaining the nuclear retaliatory force in
isolation from the disaster areas that the cities would become
under nuclear attack; and of protecting it [the retaliatory force]
from conventional ground forces.

The ability to fight back after an atomic bomb attack will de-
pend on the degree to which the armed forces have made them-
selves independent of the urban communities and their indus-
tries for supply and support. The proposition just made
is the basic proposition of atomic bomb warfare. . . .
(p. 88, emphasis in the original).

229

In fact, Brodie considers and dismisses the "private arguments"
of "certain scientists" that nuclear attack on nuclear launch sites
might be effective without ground force seizure of the launch
sites.

Certain scientists have argued privately that ... a nation
committing aggression with atomic bombs would have
so paralyzed its opponent as to make invasion wholly
superfluous. It might be alleged that such an argument
does not give due credit to the atomic bomb, since it
neglects the necessity of preventing or minimizing re-
taliation in kind. If the experience with the V-1 and V-2
launching sites in World War II means anything at all, it
indicates that only occupation of such sites will finally
prevent their being used. Perhaps the greater destruc-
tiveness of the atomic bomb as compared with the bombs
used against V-1 and V-2 sites will make an essential dif-
ference in this respect, but it should be remembered that
thousands of tons of bombs were dropped on those sites
(pp. 91 and 92).

However,

An invasion designed to prevent large-scale retaliation
with atomic bombs to any considerable degree would
have to be incredibly swift and sufficiently powerful to
overwhelm instantly any opposition. Moreover, it would
have to descend in one fell swoop upon points scattered
throughout the length and breadth of the enemy territo-
ry. The question arises whether such an operation is pos-
sible, especially across broad water barriers, against any
great power which is not completely asleep and which
has sizable armed forces at its disposal (pp. 92 and 93).

And

The invasion and occupation of a great country solely
or even chiefly by air would be an incredibly difficult
task even if one assumes a minimum of air opposition
(p. 93).

Brodie regarded ground force occupation of strategic air bases
as necessary to prevent retaliation, but infeasible. However, he

230

regarded ground force invasion as both feasible and necessary
to consolidate the effects of atomic bombardment of cities and
industry. Much the same view is reflected in the official Air Force
position expressed by General H. H. Arnold at about that time.^^

The realistic insights of Viner, Brodie, and Fox are best
appreciated as a contrast with the utopianism of the scientists at
the end of the war. The Manhattan Project physicists (and a good
many others who knew about the Manhattan Project early and
felt that it had revolutionary implications for warfare) believed
that it made both necessary and possible a revolutionary change
in international relations. They were thinking of something
like world government, or at least very extensive international
control, and frequently said that it was feasible just because it
was urgent and necessary. The apocalyptic predictions they
made tended, therefore, to have a hortatory character. They
were appeals for a soul change in world statesmen. Publicists
like Norman Cousins in his Modern Man Is Obsolete accepted the
essentials of their apocalyptic view.^^ Viner, Brodie, and Fox were
particularly discerning and incisive in their perception that, on
one hand, ways of organizing the world for perfect peace were
not then available, nor would be in the foreseeable future, and
that, on the other hand, the alternative of nuclear annihilation was
not inevitable, that there were some elements of stability implicit
in the scientists' own picture of nuclear relations, or rather in one
of their pictures.

In sum, Viner, Brodie, and Fox made many cogent points
of great importance. But none seriously considered the problem
of designing a nuclear force to survive a major nuclear surprise
attack, nor did they show any awareness that this was a problem
at all, much less a basic one. In fact, they were further from seeing
this than some of the scientists — inconsistently to be sure, in writing
and in "private arguments" —were at least some of the time.

The Military Views and the Military Stance

As I have mentioned, the Manhattan Project physicists, once
they had abandoned hope for early agreement on international
control of atomic energy, tended to line up with one faction or
another of the military. After the Russians turned down the
Baruch proposal, some physicists, like Edward Teller, thought
about fusion weapons and improvements of the strategic offense.
Many more, like Bush, Oppenheimer, Rabinowitch, and Rabi,^^

231

turned to the defense of cities and the problems of battlefield war.
Project East River considered civil defense. The Lincoln Summer
Study focused on the active defense of the industrial heartland
of the United States and on providing early warning for fighter
interceptors.^* Project Vista proposed battlefield nuclear weapons
for the defense of Europe. It is familiar now that the factional
disputes among the scientists, and the corresponding ones within
and among the services, were bitter and destructive. Perhaps the
most fascinating aspect of these disputes (one that has not been
observed) is their total neglect of the increasingly serious problem
of the vulnerability of strategic forces, of the problem of obtaining
a defended offense. This neglect affected both the military and the
scientists, including all the principal factions of each.

The service positions on the A-bomb in the immediate
postwar period were predictable. The War Department held that
the A-bomb "has given the offensive a marked advantage, at
least for the time being, over the defensive." {Bulletin of the Atomic
Scientists, June 1947, reprinting Army Navy Journal for April 12,
1947.) The Navy Department, on the other hand, had it that "the
present technological trend is decidedly in favor of the defense."
It "decidedly favors the defense of large centers of population
and industry." {Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, July 1947.) This
disagreement deepened and culminated in the B-36 Hearings at
the end of the decade, where the Navy said that the bomb had
little chance of getting through and that it would do little harm
if it did. (I mentioned the brave naval officer who said one could
stand at one end of the runway at Washington National Airport
"with no more protection than the clothes you now have on,
and have an atom bomb explode at the other end of the runway
without serious injury to you.")^^ And LeMay^* affirmed that the
bomber always gets through.

However, the Navy never brought up the subject of the liability
of nuclear bombers to be destroyed before takeoff on the ground
by enemy nuclear bombers; and neither did the War Department,
nor its Air Force split-off. General Arnold (then Air Force Chief
of Staff) early in 1946 argued for the possibility, though not the
certainty, of an atomic stalemate through mutual fear:

Now the arguments given above are not intended
to comfort us with the thought that, if all nations had
atomic weapons no nation would use them for fear of
retaliation. All they show is that there is a possibility of

232

stalemate with respect to destruction of cities by atomic
bombs {One World or None, p. 32, emphasis in the origi-
nal).

He was thinking of cities, though with the usual ambiguities about
industrial support of military strength, and the "will to resist"
(see p. 27). His view was less downright and abstract, though not
unlike that of Viner:

Our defense can only be a counteroffensive; we must be
prepared to give as good as we take or better. Should
we ever find ourselves facing an aggressor who could
destroy our industrial machine without having his de-
stroyed in turn, our defeat would be assured. Thus our
first defense is the ability to retaliate even after receiv-
ing the hardest blow the enemy can deliver. This means
weapons in adequate numbers strategically distributed
so that no enemy is better situated to strike our industry
than we are to strike his {One World or None, p. 31).

The war would be an exchange of blows against cities and
industry.

I had intended to describe in some detail the characteristic
developments in the nuclear doctrines of each of the services.
Unfortunately, there isn't time for that. Nor is there time to
say much on the history of the actual plans and operations of
the Strategic Air Command and the Air Defense Command. ^^
However, I will say a little about actual deployments, operations,
and plans for most of the 1950s.

A rough way to characterize the nuclear offense stance is
to say that it was focused on the problem of coordinating an
immense attack capable of penetrating Russian area and local
active defenses in order to deliver a decisive blow, primarily to
the industrial heartland of the Soviet Union. The planning for this
was ingenious and efficient — given time to get the attack under
way undisturbed. And almost the only sorts of disturbance that
had been seriously considered were those that might have been
by-products of a Russian attack on American cities, or sabotage,
or conventional ground attack. Such "by-product" disturbances
to SAC were, correctly, not anticipated to be large or extremely
difficult to overcome. In this respect, the active offense stance
reflected a view similar to that of Viner and Brodie.

233

A rough way to characterize the defense stance against nuclear
attack would parallel this focus of the offense force on the enemy
active defense of the enemy heartland. Our defense was focused on
the problem of intercepting Russian bombers before they reached
the bomb release line over American cities and war-supporting
industry. The contiguous radars were deployed primarily in the
Northeast industrial heartland and near our coastal cities. Though
they had a variety of problems, including that of saturation by a
large raid employing electronic countermeasures, the radar and
air defense bomber system was able to detect and track bombers
and guide fighters toward the interception of a massive raid in
particular.

Our offense and our defense stances changed over time as
our own and the Russian stocks of nuclear weapons swelled. But
in some essentials they changed not at all. Viner, an excellent
economist, had derived from the physicists and chemists in 1945
the assumption that A-bombs would always be expensive and
scarce because fissile material was scarce. (Eugene Rabinowitch's
writings at the time offer examples.) However, an elementary
economic operation — raising the price of uranium — offered
incentives to a great many uranium prospectors and it soon
became clear that bomb stockpiles could be greatly expanded and
that there were bombs enough for military targets in addition to
cities and industry. As our stockpile expanded, military targets,
including strategic bases, were added to our attack plans. And in
a symmetrical way the Air Defense Command assumed that with
expanding Russian stockpiles a massive Russian attack directed
at the American industrial heartland would add on some bombs
and bomb carriers directed at our nuclear force. ^* However, in
both cases these extra targets were attachments to attacks directed
basically at cities and industry. This was a quite natural way to see
the problem, given the history of views I have already outlined,
but it is important to note that it had a critical effect on the chance
that the vulnerability of SAC would be observed. For the U.S.
defenders anticipated a massive Russian attack of anywhere from
500 to over 1000 bombers directed at cities and industry and using
techniques of saturation rather than the methods of minimizing
warning possible for a smaller force directed solely or mainly at
SAC.^' So massive a Russian attack was likely to provide strategic
warning and would quite reliably have given extended tactical
warning — enough tactical warning, perhaps, to be useful to even
a very ponderous and complex strategic force. This was by no

234

means true, however, for an adversary who designed his first raid
specifically to disrupt and destroy a strategic retaliation. Surprise
turned out to be as important as the Manhattan Project physicists
had assumed, but for very different reasons.

SAC bases, unfortunately, were located primarily outside the
radar cover that had been designed for the defense of cities and
industries: they were mainly not in the Northeast, but in the South
and West, where the flying weather for training is good, and for
the most part where they would not be engulfed in a disaster of
the cities. The bombers and tankers were concentrated on a few
crowded and shelterless bases (some holding a total of about
120 bombers and tankers). The bases in the continental United
States expanded slowly in number, reaching about 28 or 29 in
1956. Other, equally indispensable elements of the force, such as
the stockpiles of bombs and command and control, were even
more concentrated. The bombers normally were stripped down
and in maintenance, a state that enabled very high availability
rates, given notice of a day or two, but extremely low readiness
for the first six hours after receiving warning. However, even
an improved warning network, designed specifically for the
protection of SAC, could not have assured anything like that much
warning. But the warning network had been designed primarily
for the protection of cities and industry. If the strategic force could
have survived a modest attack on its home bases, the plans called
for an immensely complex operation of coordinating slow tankers
and bombers, picking up [nuclear ordnance] at bomb stockpile
sites generally far from the home base, and finally deploying to
overseas bases, which were far more vulnerable than the home
bases left behind. Fred Hoffman remarked during the Base Study
that the problem of the analyst looking soberly at the vulnerability
of SAC sometimes boiled down to propping SAC up over one
barrier so that it could be knocked down at the next, so many
were the alternative, entirely feasible, ways of destroying it.

At several points in your paper you suggest that the Russians
had no capability for attacking the United States until rather late —
until after they had acquired a stock of thermonuclear weapons,
or after they had acquired very long-range aircraft or possibly
after Sputnik and the intercontinental missile. In fact, before 1955
the Russians had enough planes with adequate range and enough
bombs with adequate yield to have done a great deal of damage
to American cities, if not intercepted. This was understood and
displayed in all of the intelligence estimates during a period when

235

intelligence generally underestimated the Russians. Even more
important, only a fraction of their estimated capability was enough to
dispose of SAC.

Finally, the Russian force itself was even more concentrated
and vulnerable than the American strategic force. Neither side
had a second-strike capability, in the sense in which I defined it.

I said at the meeting in Oxford that the vulnerability of SAC
had nothing to do with Air Force stupidity, or folly, or anything of
the sort. Nuclear weapons were new; their implications were little
understood; and the strategic force planners tended to examine
the meaning of nuclear weapons to see how they affected the
answers to the questions of strategic bombing as these questions
had been understood previously. (See my comments in "Analysis
and Design of Conflict Systems," pp. 109ff and 125ff .)^'' Moreover,
the Navy and ground Army themselves failed to see that nuclear
weapons raised new questions of the vulnerability of retaliatory
forces before launching. And the limitation was not simply
military; it affected natural and social scientists as well. Nor were
these matters obvious to able systems analysts, who had access to
data and worked on other closely related questions.

Systems Analysts

At the end of the 1940s and in the early 1950s there were a
good many analysts working in operational research organizations
attached to the Strategic Air Command or the Air Defense
Command. They dealt with important but relatively restricted
questions that had to be answered to improve decisions by the
operational commanders: questions such as techniques for the
offense for penetrating defenses; alternative ways of releasing
weapons over target, such as high altitude versus low altitude
bomb release; and techniques for the defense system for sifting
out potentially hostile attacks from the normal air traffic patterns
displayed on radar. For this purpose they used actual data on
the performance of men and equipment and the actual detailed
geography.

At Rand this sort of study was extended to include a much
wider and longer range of choices, involving choices among
equipments that would be available several years hence and that
would alter significantly current operational performance, such as
speed, altitude, range of bomber aircraft, performance of defense
radars, and a host of other matters. Some of these studies were

236

excellent. The systems studies for active defense led by Barlow
and Digby (R-227 in 1951 and R-250 in 1953)^^ were particularly
impressive. Impressive and serious treatments of the functioning
of immensely complicated systems of interdependent elements
were done in very realistic and objective fashion on the basis of
a very large effort by many researchers closely aware of current
military operations as well as of impending changes in the state of
the art. These persistent and careful efforts contrasted greatly with
crash campaigns like the Lincoln Summer Study, which exploited
the famous names of Manhattan Project physicists to sell some
gadgetry such as the DEW line and the Whirlwind computer, or
later the SAGE system, as handy-dandy solutions to the problem
of getting nearly perfect active defense of cities and industry. If
the subject of this letter were the problem of limiting damage in
case deterrence fails, there would be a good deal to say about
the Barlow-Digby study. Moreover, unlike minimum deterrence
theorists, I regard active defense as a subject of continuing
interest.

However, I am dealing here mainly with the development
of our understanding of problems of stable deterrence. The most
important observation to be made in this respect about the offense
bombing systems analyses — such as that of Quade-Shamberg-
Specht, A Comparison of Airplane Systems for Strategic Bombing,
September 1950 (R-208)^^ and the defense systems analyses led by
Barlow and Digby — is that, as far as the problems of deterrence and
retaliation were concerned, these studies exhibited exactly the same
tunnel vision as did the military plans and the informal utterances
and essays of the natural and social scientists. The offense systems
analyses examined systematically alternative equipments and
methods for American bombers to penetrate Russia's defense of
her heartland. They matched American bombers against Russian
fighters and surface-to-air missiles. The defense systems analyses,
on the other hand, essentially matched Russian bombers against
American interceptors and local defenses; moreover, even when
they added our SAC bases in the United States to the Russian list
of offense targets, as in the case of our military plans, this was
done simply as a perturbation of an attack directed essentially at
crippling population and industry. The defense analyses never
therefore considered attacks specifically designed for the purpose
of surprising and destroying the strategic force.

The systems analysis embodied in the Base Study addressed
that problem. It observed that surprise had a different and greater

237

significance for the possible nuclear destruction of the retaliatory
force than it did for an attack on cities and industry.

The advantages of mounting the first surprise attack of a
war (little or no warning of city populations, confusion
of defenses) have been generally recognized. The sur-
prise attack is doubly important for attack on strategic
bases, since many of the most vital and vulnerable ele-
ments on these bases are mobile, and, if the attack comes
as no surprise, aircraft, personnel and essential material
may have been evacuated from the bases before bomb
release. . . . The surprise attack, large or small scale, must
be regarded as a major threat to SAC survival (p. 233).^^

Exploiting the information, expertise, and methods that had been
developed in the offense and defense analyses, it matched enemy
offense and defense against our own offense and defense in
potential attacks designed specifically to destroy an inadequately
defended offense. The results were a shock. The authors knew
the results in a preliminary way by the start of 1952 but spent the
following fifteen months systematically checking and testing the
conclusions, as well as refining them and designing improvements.
When I briefed the results internally to the Rand Management
Committee at the end of 1953, even though there had been quite
a few rumors and preliminary indications, the shock was quite as
great. Though the results seem painfully obvious now and were
overwhelmingly evidenced then, the fact that the study caused
this shock suggests how completely the prior strategic focus
and assumptions had precluded an understanding of how hard
it was to design a strategic force capable of surviving a nuclear
attack directed at its destruction. For the same reason, the results
of the study had to be briefed over 90 times to the military and
particularly to audiences of specialists in related plans and
operations.

There are a few observations worth making. First, these studies
deliberately understated the vulnerability of the programmed
systems. R-244S and R-266^* showed the deadly results of attacks
using as few as 30 bombs of 40-kiloton yield, at a time when
intelligence estimated that the Russians would have 400 bombs,
many in the megaton range. Against the programmed system it
employed mostly medium-range Russian piston-engine bombers,
the TU-4, modeled on our own B-29 and B-50. These were times

238

when intelligence, moreover, was underestimating the Russians.
(After Sputnik, intelligence frequently went to the opposite pole;
but before that it underestimated how rapidly the Russians would
get the A-bomb, jet-fighters, the H-bomb, long-range turbo jet and
turbo-prop bombers, and how rapidly they would expand their
stockpile of weapons.) The conservatism is also illustrated by
comparing the forces presumed by the Base Study for 1956 with
those actually revealed by intelligence in 1956 to be operational.
This comparison can be made by examining R-290's section on
"current vulnerability" (that is, 1956 vulnerability).^^ It can also
be shown by comparing the 1961 capabilities presumed in R-290
with the capabilities which were public knowledge by 1961. For
example, the best accuracy assumed in R-290 to be available to the
Russians for attacking the programmed strategic force in 1961 was
2 nautical miles (see p. 27). But President Eisenhower revealed
before 1961 that the Russians and we had achieved accuracies of
1 mile. This makes quite a difference. The number of weapons
needed to destroy a target varies essentially as the square of the
median miss-distance. This means roughly that when circular
error probable, or CEP (that is, median miss-distance), is halved,
the salvo needed for destruction is divided by four. The curve on
p. 27 with this adjustment looks even worse. But R-290 showed
that it was feasible to destroy the force programmed for 1961
using only manned aircraft. The results in no way depended on a
"missile gap." The entire method of both studies, however, was
to show that even with the most favorable assumptions for our
side, the situation was extremely bad. We therefore omitted in the
printed version and for large audiences some even more extreme
vulnerabilities.

Third, we studied attacks on all nuclear forces capable of
retaliation, including carrier task forces. (See pp. llff and 30ff of
R-290.)

Fourth, the data and the reasoning of the study were subjected
to intensive review by experienced military officers, who were
by no means eager to accept these painful conclusions. This was
done not only in the course of the long series of briefings for
the specialists but during months of examination by an ad hoc
committee of the Air Staff which included as members officers
from Plans, Logistics, Operations, and other parts of the Air Force.
Even if we had been able to guess a -priori the results of the study,
we would never have been able to persuade any substantial
number of military men whose a priori guesses had been quite the
contrary.

239

But finally an examination of the Base Study, and of the study
that followed it after another three years of work, should make
clear that a priori reasoning on these matters could hardly hope to
yield convincing conclusions.

When I suggest that a systems analysis was necessary, I
am referring not so much to the sort of training in a specific
traditional discipline that was required; I refer rather to a kind
of activity or function. The systems analysts in studying the
potential interactions of military forces to aid military decision,
used extensive data on peacetime operations and logistics, data
on the actual geographical and temporal distribution of forces
and equipment, and data derived from state-of-the-art studies
and theoretical analyses of equipment design, including data
both for ourselves and for our adversary. Some first-class systems
analysts, like Jim Digby and Ed Barlow, were electronic engineers;
or like Robert Lutz, a co-author of the Base Study, an aeronautical
engineer; like Bruno Augenstein, a physicist. Some were
mathematicians, like Ed Quade, or mathematical statisticians,
like Andy Marshall, or mathematical logicians, like myself and
Norman Dalkey. Some had training in more than one discipline;
Marshall and I had worked in economics, Marshall also had done
work in physics, and I in industrial engineering. Harry Rowen
was trained in engineering and economics. Or, like Fred Hoffman,
they were trained mainly in economics. Economists played a key
role. But at least one sociologist-demographer, Fred Ikle, did a
partial systems analysis of great importance on the problem of
reducing the chance of nuclear accidents and unauthorized acts.
Bill Kaufmann, so far as I know, is the only political scientist with
traditional training who undertook and successfully executed a
concrete analysis of the potential operations of actual military
systems, and he did this around 1960. It is not strictly correct to
contrast systems analysts with physicists or social scientists or
engineers. Some of each of these have been systems analysts.^*"

What these men had in common is that they were dealing
with actual operational, design, and plans data. They were not
basing evaluations on simple models and a priori guesses as to
the performance of the interacting strategic offense and defense
of both sides.

This line of attack stemmed from operational research
during World War II. Pat Blackett deserves an honored place as
progenitor of this method in his work during World War II, along
with Harold Larnder and several others in the United Kingdom
and in the United States. ^^ He used methods that later were greatly

240

extended for the more complex military decisions on equipment
and operations in the postwar period, when many more variables
were open.

Blackett, in a well-known paper on operational research^*
written during World War II, gave some illustrations of why it
was absurd to hope to reach reasonable conclusions on the typical
problems of potential interactions among military forces unless
one had access to operational data — data, he was constrained to
point out, that even physicists working on secret research and
development problems normally could not and did not have. He
considered the case of the anti-U-boat operations by aircraft. "The
yield of the operations . . . will depend at least on the following
variables: U-boats — number operating, tactics, defensive strength,
offensive armament, geographical distribution, state of training
and morale of crews, efficiency of look-outs; Aircraft — number and
duration of sorties, search tactics, height of patrol, attack tactics,
bomb load, accuracy of bombing, geographical and temporal
distribution, performance, camouflage of aircraft, performance of
radar, site of training and fatigue of crews; Weather Conditions —
state of the sea, cloud height and amount, visibility." He concluded:
"To attempt an a priori solution of this problem is clearly absurd."
One needs data.

But it is even more plainly absurd to suppose that one can
determine a priori whether the American strategic force in the
mid-1950s, say, was vulnerable to attack by a Russian strategic
nuclear force, or whether the strategic force planned for the 1960s
was likely to be easily destroyed. The absurdity is plainer because
there are many more variables involved in a systems analysis
of the problem of nuclear retaliation than the twenty-one listed
by Blackett for the anti-U-boat operation. And, in fact, some of
the individual components of the second-strike problem are of an
order of complexity like that of the anti-U-boat case.

The point that Blackett made about the need for classified
operational data for wartime operational research can easily be
misunderstood, as can my similar point about the design and
analysis of complex opposed systems in the postwar period. It
might be taken as a sort of obscurantism, a suggestion that the
people with "inside dope," and only such dopesters, have sound
conclusions about the critical, potential interactions of military
forces in the period under discussion. However, that is not his
meaning; nor is it mine.

241

First, one can have access to secret "inside information" and
make no use of it — or make very poor use of it. Just as a library
card or other access to the Bibliotheque Nationale, the British
Museum, and the Library of Congress does not automatically
assure that its holder has made a study of the historical documents
they contain, or, if he has, that he has done it competently and
written an able history; so a clearance providing access to secret
operational as well as design data is very far from assuring that
its holder has used such data in a competent, serious analysis. In
fact, the frequent assurances by an electronics engineer such as
Jerry Wiesner or a physicist such as Herbert York in October 1964
that no important technological changes were likely to affect the
strategic offense or the strategic defense demonstrate that even
design and development data, not to say operational complexities,
may be ignored by people with access, especially when they have
an ideological axe to grind. ^'

They said this when it was already clear that multiple,
independently aimed reentry vehicles and increased precision
could work revolutionary changes in the offense, and that phased
array radars, advances in the computer art, and new weapons
effects that greatly increased the lethal volume of defense
warheads, could revolutionize active defense against ICBMs.
Moreover, these changes did not simply cancel each other, they
affected the relations between large, sophisticated and small,
less-advanced nuclear forces. Even more than such failures to use
access to development data to anticipate technological changes,
there are failures to analyze the strategic military consequences
of such technological changes — even when participants in the
strategic debate have, so to speak, their "library card," that is,
could get access to the data but do not go through the laborious
analysis required. To me, it has been simply appalling how much
of the debate proceeds in terms of the scholastic absurdities of a
priori models, whether the debaters have access or do not. Among
those who do not have access, Blackett has the smallest excuse
for such a priori reasoning since, when not consumed by political
passions, he knows better.

Second, the point against simple a priori models that pretend
to cover interactions involving several dozen variables can be
made in another, somewhat more explicit, way. No conclusion
at all is possible except by picking values for the many variables
involved. One has to determine the range, the speed, the altitude,
the radar cross-section of the offense vehicles, their precision in

242

navigation and bomb delivery, the yield of the weapons, and
many other matters on the offense side; and one must determine
the location in space and time of the vehicles under attack, their
degree of readiness, protection against blast and other weapons
effects, etc. If one determines these values arbitrarily, one can get
any conclusion desired. It will depend simply on the arbitrary
choice. If one determines it by rumor — the rumor that the B-47s
used three or four hundred bases (see Raymond Aron, Paix et
Guerre)/° or the rumor that one-third of SAC was armed, combat
ready, and in the air at all times (see Patterson and Furniss, NATO,
A Critical Appraisal), '^^ or, even more farfetched, that there was, in
the 1950s, a continuous air-alert of short-range fighter bombers, as
Blackett suggests — then one can emerge only with a conclusion as
valid as the rumors themselves.*^ All these and many other rumors,
however, were quite false. One must agree with Blackett' s original
position that it is hopelessly absurd to judge the outcomes of such
complex interactions without access to actual operational data,
plans, and deployments. Such access is a necessary, though not
a sufficient, condition for concrete judgments about the stability
of nuclear deterrence at any particular time. There seems to me
to be a very grave lack of understanding of this point today in
the European and British discussions of strategy, not to say the
American ones.

I do not by any means reject the importance of the more
philosophical and conceptual analyses of strategy, but they are
severely limited by a lack of empirical concreteness as to what they
can say about the actual relations among opposing military forces
in any given historical period. I am sure that as a historian, you find
no difficulty in distinguishing essays on the philosophy of history
by Isaiah Berlin or E. H. Carr or M. G. White, however valuable,
from concrete historical studies such as your monumental work
on the Franco-Prussian war, or Carr's history of Russia.*^

I would distinguish my own essays on matters of principle
and basic concepts, such as "The Delicate Balance of Terror"** —
which was not about the vulnerability of strategic forces in 1958 —
from the detailed, empirical studies, consuming years for their
completion, of the operations of deterrence in the 1950s, or the
operations of deterrence in the late 1950s and the 1960s.

I say this even though the concepts elaborated in my own
public essays were developed for the most part as working
tools — e.g., the second-strike concept, the idea of deterrence as
a matter of comparative risks, and the recognition that a stable

243

deterrence was feasible, but hard, and that its stability was subject
to technological upset. When "The Delicate Balance..." stated
that:

it is not fruitful to talk about the likelihood of general
war without specifying the range of alternatives that are
pressing on the aggressor and the strategic postures of
both the Soviet bloc and the West. Deterrence is a matter
of comparative risks. The balance is not automatic. First,
since thermonuclear weapons give an enormous advan-
tage to the aggressor, it takes great ingenuity and real-
ism at any given level of nuclear technology to devise a
stable equilibrium. And, second, this technology itself is
changing with fantastic speed. Deterrence will require
an urgent and continuing effort.*'

It reflected a concrete judgment made earlier in R-290, pp. 40-41:

The attacks described here, and many others studied,
clearly indicate the present vulnerability of our strike
force. They do not, of course, imply that a Russian at-
tack is imminent. Nor do we think it is. That is a mat-
ter of Soviet intention rather than Soviet capability, and
such intent would be affected in the first instance by So-
viet knowledge of our vulnerability and in the second
instance by the comparative gains and risks of alterna-
tives to central war. Nonetheless it is a painful fact that
the risks to the Soviets of attempting a surprise attack
on the United States are much lower than are generally
estimated. We would like this course of Soviet action to
be a worse alternative to almost any other they might
contemplate — including, for example, the acceptance of
defeat in some limited or peripheral war. But the sober
and careful scrutiny of the present vulnerability of our
strike force to feasible Russian attacks, and realistic tests
of the plans for its future defense, show the seriousness
of the problem.

And the reference to the possibility of technological upset was
not hypothetical. It was based on the fact that by the time the
Base Study was finished and some, though not all, of its principal
recommendations were accepted, I knew that it had no more than

244

seven years or so to run. In the 1960s, vehicles traveUng 4 miles per
second would make warning and alert measures inadequate. Fred
Hoffman and I wrote "Defending A Strategic Force after 1960"
(0-2270)** and put it out on February 1, 1954, as the first rough
cut at the problem of protecting SAC in the ballistic missile era.
It was the precursor of R-290, which was not issued for two and
a half years, but this precursor of the second study showing the
technological limits of the first study was put out before the final
report of the first study was issued in April. Moreover, it proposed
the system of hardening adopted for the 1960s, but foresaw that
hardening would be enough for only a finite time — that in the
1970s precision was likely to have increased enough to make it
inadequate even though still useful. (Today an ABM defense of
hardened ballistic missiles seems a very likely way of maintaining
stability of the deterrent in the 1970s, but that can be accepted or
rejected only on the basis of a detailed system analysis.)

It is conceivable that these particular concepts might have been
arrived at a priori but I'm rather skeptical. In any case, it should be
plain from the history I have tried to document why the discovery
of the vulnerability of SAC, the development of the first-strike/
second-strike distinction, and the recognition of the feasible but
limited and difficult stability of deterrence, owe substantially
nothing to the strategic writings of the natural and social scientists.
I was not familiar with these writings, and if I had been they could
hardly have led me to make the conclusions that emerged from
empirical study. I am afraid that your footnote 41, p. 15, and your
paragraph beginning "Not until thermonuclear weapons . . ."
on p. 6 are misleading.*^ The work at Rand that you refer to did
not study the implications of Brodie's ideas. The work was quite
unconscious of these early ideas of Brodie and Viner. Moreover,
the study came to precisely the opposite conclusions from those
implied by Viner and Brodie. The timing and direction of influence
suggested in your footnote 41 and your p. 15 seem then in error.
The analysis of the vulnerability of strategic forces was clear to the
authors of the Base Study by the beginning of 1952, and the first
summary printed report (R-244-S) was formally presented to the
Air Force on March 1, 1953. Morgenstern, Schelling, and Brodie
all had read, as consultants or staff members of Rand, some or
all of the sequence of papers and reports on the subject.** This
is by no means to minimize the great importance of Schelling' s
keen analysis of the relations of the problems of surprise attack,
deterrence, and disarmament. His essay was an illuminating

245

example of the sorts of basic clarification that can proceed without
new empirical effort on the foundation of intuition, common
sense, and previous empirical work. But the discovery of the
vulnerabilities of strategic forces owes its primary debt to the
tradition of operational research and empirical systems analysis.
Hence, the acknowledgments at the beginning of the Base Study
to J. F. Digby, E. J. Barlow, E. S. Quade, P. M. Dadant, E. Reich, et
al.^'^ Because their contributions to strategy have been classified,
they are largely unknown. This is true even of the important
contributions of men like Fred Hoffman and Harry Rowen which
are a little better known.^" They are largely unsung heroes of
strategy in the nuclear age.

I must apologize for the extreme length of this "letter." And
for the corresponding length of time it has taken me to get it off. It
is focused on one central problem, that of the stability of nuclear
deterrence. Your paper quite rightly deals with many other
problems besides this one. I hope, however, the material I have
drawn from my lectures on this one subject will be useful.

ENDNOTES - Wohlstetter - On the Genesis of Nuclear
Strategy

Note: Unbracketed endnotes are Wohlstetter' s. Endnotes in square
brackets were added in by April 1986 by James Digby and Arthur
Steiner. Endnotes in double-square brackets were added in 2008 by
Robert Zarate.

1. [These collections are now in the Joseph Regenstein Library
at the University of Chicago, the Historian's office of the U.S.
Department of Energy, and the U.S. National Archives.]

2. [In the Adelphi Paper version this becomes pp. 19ff.] [[See
Michael Howard, "The Classical Strategists," Adelphi Paper No.
54, London, UK: Institute for Strategic Studies, 1969; and "The
Classical Strategists," in Howard, ed.. Studies in Peace and War,
New York, NY: The Viking Press, 1971, pp. 154-183.]]

3. [P. M. S. Blackett, British Nobel Laureate physicist,
pioneer in operational research, was author of Fear, War, and the
Bomb, published in the United States by McGraw-Hill in 1949.
Vannevar Bush, electrical engineer, was head of the Organization
for Scientific Research and Development during World War II,
making him, in effect, the nation's chief scientist for the war effort.

246

He wrote Modern Arms and Free Men, published by Simon and
Schuster in 1949.]

4. [Refers to Jacob Viner, Chicago economist and specialist in
international trade; Bernard Brodie, political scientist at Yale, 1945-
51, and later at Rand; and William T. R. Fox, political scientist and
associate of Brodie at Yale in the late 1940s, later at Columbia.]

5. [The title of a book edited by Dexter Masters and Katharine
Way, One World or None, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1946.]

6. These documents are in the Atomic Energy Commission
collection. See p. 329 of the Hewlett and Anderson official history.
[Richard Hewlett and Oscar Anderson, The New World: Vol. 1 of
a History of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, University Park:
Pennsylvania State University Press, 1962. One of the three similar
memoranda of that date, signed by Bush and James Conant, was
published as an appendix to Martin J. Sherwin, A World Destroyed,
New York: Knopf, 1975. The three original memoranda can now
be found in the National Archives.]

7. [Adelphi version, p. 21. See editors' preface, above, for a
note on how this was changed by Howard.]

8. [All signers of the Jeffries report were senior scientists at the
Metallurgical Laboratory, University of Chicago. For background
on the "Prospectus on Nucleonics," see Hewlett and Anderson,
op.cit., pp. 324-325, and Alice Kimball Smith, A Peril and a Hope,
Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1965, pp. 19-24 and 539-
559. Most of the text is reprinted in Smith, ibid.; the full text is in
the National Archives.]

9. [Here Wohlstetter was referring to unpublished writings
that are still not generally available.]

10. [The Franck Report, a report to the Secretary of War,
is reprinted as an appendix in Smith, op.cit., pp. 560-572. For
background, see ibid., pp. 41-52, and Arthur Steiner, "Baptism of
the Atomic Scientists," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, February
1975, pp. 21-28.]

247

11. "Atomic Weapons," paper presented at a Symposium of
the American Philosophical Society on Atomic Energy and Its
Implications, Philadelphia, November 1945. [See Proceedings of the
American Philosophical Society, Vol. 90, No. 1, January 29, 1946, The
American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, 1946.]

12. [Quoted in] Hewlett and Anderson, p. 358. [The Interim
Committee was set up by Secretary of War Stimson in May 1945
to advise him on atomic energy policy. Its scientific panel was
composed of Oppenheimer, Fermi, Lawrence, and Arthur H.
Compton. The minutes of the meeting that included the Scientific
Panel have been published as an appendix in Sherwin, op.cit. The
original is in the National Archives.]

13. [The quoted passage is from Atomic Energy, Hearings on S.
Res. 179, Special Committee on Atomic Energy, U.S. Senate, 79th
Congress, First Session, Part I, U.S. Government Printing Office,
1946.]

14. Sometimes 4 [square] miles was estimated for total
destruction. [The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey report. The Effects
of Atomic Bombs on Hiroshima and 'Nagasaki, U.S. Government
Printing Office, 1946, pp. 3 and 30, cites "4.4 sq mi which were
almost completely burned out" at Hiroshima and 9.9 sq mi as
the area within which wood frame buildings were damaged at
Nagasaki.]

15. [Wigner was a Manhattan Project physicist, later a Nobel
Laureate.]

16. [Albert Wohlstetter, Henry S. Rowen, Robert Lutz, and
Fred Hoffman, Selection and Use of Strategic Air Bases, Rand Report
R-266, 1954 (declassified in 1962). Publicly released in 1985, a
number of copies have been in scholarly hands for some time;
for a description of its methodology, see E. S. Quade, Analysis for
Military Decisions, Chicago: Rand McNally, 1966, Chap. 3, pp. 24-
63. See also Bruce L. R. Smith, The RAND Corporation, Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1966, Chapt. VI.]

17. At the same symposium that included Oppenheimer's
paper on "Atomic Weapons," and also a short, less explicit
version by Langmuir of his four-stage atomic arms race. ["The
Implications of the Atomic Bomb for International Relations,"

248

Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 90, No.
1, January 1946. Viner's paper is also available in his International
Economics, Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1951, pp. 300-309.]

18. Not that it was unanticipated. The University of Chicago
scientists had met on September 20, 1945, and concluded that
"The atomic bomb makes surprise an unimportant element of
warfare. Retaliation in equal terms is unavoidable, and in this
sense the atomic bomb is a war deterrent, a peace-making force"
(Box 28, Folder 25, Harper Collection). Viner, however, unlike the
physicists, noticed the inconsistency with some of the principal
themes these same physicists were advancing at the time. [Viner
attended the conference and read an early version of his paper. The
Harper Collection is now in the Regenstein Library, University of
Chicago.]

19. [Gallois retired from the French air force and became an
advocate of a French nuclear capability. For a summary of his
early views, see Howard's Adelphi version, p. 29.]

20. [Bernard Brodie,ed., The Absolute Weapon: Atomic Power and
World Order, New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1946. Brodie contributed
Chaps. I and II, pp. 21-107.]

21. [See Masters and Way, op.cit., pp. 26-32.]

22. [See Norman Cousins's editorial in The Saturday Review of
Literature, August 18, 1945, pp. 5-9. Cousins's editorial preceded
the scientists' public statements.]

23. [I.I. Rabi, Nobel Laureate physicist, was a consultant to the
Manhattan Project and a member of many governmental advisory
committees after World War II. ]

24. East River and Lincoln came at the start of the 1950s and
were accompanied and followed by a great flurry of concern in
the universities and in the intellectual community about urban
defense. It was reflected in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
and in the liberal and popular magazines and newspapers at
the time, and it culminated in the disasters of the Oppenheimer
Hearings. [U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. In the Matter of J.
Robert Oppenheimer, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1971. See index

249

for many references to Lincoln, East River, and Vista.] [[Digby
and Steiner's index is not included in this edited volume.]] Your
statement, p. 14, about the timing of the public concern is almost
the reverse of what actually happened. Sputnik occurred near the
end of the campaign for civil defense by the MIT, Harvard, Cal
Tech, and etc., faculty members, who then switched back to the
notion that there was no defense and that defense indeed might
be destabilizing. Teller and others tended to change places with
their physicist opponents in a kind of minuet. But they never
commanded the support of the intellectual community that
Oppenheimer, Bethe, Rabi, Rabinowitch, et al., had. [The reference
to p. 14 was to material on p. 26, Adelphi version.]

25. Statement of Eugene Tatom, Commander, U.S. Navy. The
'National Defense Program-Unification and Strategy, Hearings before
the Committee on Armed Services, House of Representatives, 81st
Congress, First Session, October 1949, U.S. Government Printing
Office, Washington, 1949, p. 170. Compare Blackett, a Navy
opponent of strategic bombing, in 1948: "The power of human
beings to 'stick it' is immense; a determined folk will learn to stand
atomic bombardment, if that is their fate, just as Germans learnt
to stand ordinary bombing on a scale up to fifty times larger than
that which the enthusiasts for strategic bombing thought would
bring about the collapse of their war effort." [Military and Political
Consequences of Atomic Energy, London, 1948, p. 56.) Blackett, of
course, was also then a supporter of the Soviet position on atomic
energy at the United Nations.

26. [General Curtis E. LeMay, former Commander-in-Chief,
Strategic Air Command and Chief of Staff of the Air Force during
the early 1960s. LeMay was noted for his enthusiastic advocacy of
long-range strategic bombers.]

27. [In recent years, several secondary sources have explored
the declassified original documents. See David Alan Rosenberg,
"The Origins of Overkill," International Security, Spring 1983, Vol.
7, No. 4, pp. 3-71. See also Fred Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon,
New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983. A complete annotated war
plan of the late 1940s can be found in Anthony Cave Brown,
DROPSHOT, New York: Dial Press/James Wade, 1978.]

250

28. [For example, in "Summary Evaluation of the Net
Capability of the U.S.S.R. to Inflict Direct Injury on the United
States up to July 1, 1955," NSC140/1 (May 1953), it is assumed that
a mid-1955 attack by the Soviets would allocate 80 atomic weapons
against the U.S. atomic air defensive capability worldwide, 151
against urban industrial targets, and hold 60 in reserve. Printed
in U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States,
1952-1954, Vol. II, part 1, Washington, U.S. Government Printing
Office, 1984, pp. 328-349.)]

29. [For example, JCS 1924/76, October 30, 1953, in the
National Archives, assumed a Soviet attack with 700 aircraft at
the end of 1957.]

30. [The page numbers refer to the version included in E.S.
Quade, ed.. Analysis for Military Decisions, Chicago: Rand McNally
and Company, 1964.]

31. [Edward J. Barlow and James F. Digby, eds.. Air Defense
Study, Report R-227, The Rand Corporation, Santa Monica,
October 15, 1951; Edward J. Barlow, Active Defense of the United
States 1954-1960, R-250 (Abridged), December 1, 1953. R-227 is not
yet publicly released.]

32. [According to the Rand Publications Department, R-208 is
not yet publicly released. Edward Quade was a mathematician,
Richard Schamberg an aeronautical engineer, and Robert Specht
a mathematician at Rand.]

33. [See R-266, op.cit.]

34. [R-244-S is not yet generally available. It reported in
summary form the conclusions of Wohlstetter's team. For a
discussion, see Bruce L.R. Smith, op.cit., pp. 218-219. R-266,
previously cited, was a more comprehensive report.]

35. [Albert Wohlstetter, Fred Hoffman, and H.S. Rowen,
Protecting U.S. Power To Strike Back in the 1950s and 1960s, Rand
Report R-290, The Rand Corporation, Santa Monica, 1956. This
report is not yet generally available.]

251

36. [All of the people referred to in this paragraph were
colleagues of Wohlstetter at Rand during much of the 1950s.]

37. [Harold Larnder was an English scientist who had worked
on Britain's early radars before immigrating to Canada after World
War II. He saw much of Rand analysts during the development
of the North American Air Defense Command. Wohlstetter held
him in especially high regard.]

38. [Patrick M. S. Blackett, "Operational Research," The
Advancement of Science, Vol. V, No. 17, April 1948; reprinted in
Blackett, Studies of War, Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1962, p. 188.]

39. [Jerome B. Wiesner and Herbert F. York, "National Security
and the Nuclear Test Ban," Scientific American, October 1964, pp.
27-35.]

40. [Raymond Aron, Peace and War, trans, by Richard Howard
and Annette Baker Fox, New York: Praeger, 1967, p. 422.]

41. [Gardner Patterson and Edgard S. Furniss, Jr., "NATO, a
Critical Appraisal," Princeton University Conference on NATO,
Princeton, June 1957, p. 32 (cited in "The Delicate Balance of
Terror," op. cit., p. 218).]

42. [Others may not interpret Blackett' s words in quite the
same way. Cf. Blackett, Studies, p. 133.]

43. [E. H. Carr was a British diplomat turned historian; Berlin
is a British, and White an American, philosopher.]

44. [Op. cit., pp. 211-234.]

45. [Op. cit., p. 222.]

46. [This internal Rand document has not been formally
released, but copies have been in the hands of some scholars. It
is cited, for example, in Fred Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon,
pp. 118-119. Wohlstetter himself quoted from this document in
his testimony favoring the proposed "Safeguard" anti-ballistic
missiles system. Today he continues to believe that stability would
be enhanced by active defenses, and therefore supported proposals

252

for active anti-missile defenses. (See U.S. Senate, Committee on
Armed Services, Hearings, Authorization for Military Procurement
Research, Fiscal Year 1971 and Reserve Strength, Ninety-First
Congress, Second Session, Part 3, May 19, 1970, pp. 2249-2250.)
Herbert York, an opponent of Wohlstetter on the ABM issue,
referred to D-2270 as "This remarkably prescient study" in Race to
Oblivion, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970, p. 183.]

47. [See pages 27 and 21, respectively, of the Adelphi version.
Howard made no change in footnote 41. The paragraph on old
page 6 was slightly changed to read "... the full implications
and requirements of his ideas, and others current in the United
States' academic community were to be exhaustively studied." (The
italicized phrase was added in the Adelphi version.) In footnote
11, Howard added the sentence (referring to Brodie), "He did not,
however, deal with the problem of vulnerability of retaliatory
forces and the consequent dependence of stability on an effective
second-strike capability."]

48. [Oskar Morgenstern was an economist at Princeton and a
Rand consultant; Thomas Schelling, a Harvard economist, spent
a year at Rand in 1959-1960. This led to his important book The
Strategy of Conflict, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
I960.]

49. [Digby, Barlow, and Dadant were engineers at Rand who
worked on air defense analyses in the early 1950s; Quade and
Reich were mathematicians.]

50. [Hoffman and Rowen, both economists, were and are
Wohlstetter's long-time collaborators.]

253

III. NUCLEAR PROLIFERATION

255

Commentary: Timely Warnings Still—
The Wohlstetters and Nuclear Proliferation

Henry Sokolski

Strike up a serious discussion in Washington regarding the
spread of nuclear weapons, and there's a good chance the works
of Albert and Roberta Wohlstetter will be invoked to add an air of
authority to whatever is being said. Those citing the Wohlstetter's
works, however, do so as if Albert and Roberta were only of
historical interest.^

Certainly, the Wohlstetters understood far better than most
officials do today how the spread of nuclear weapons, even to
friendly states, could undermine our security and international
stability. That's why they detailed the security risk of the United
States and other states supplying dangerous nuclear technologies
and materials for civilian purposes under loose safeguards. They
also understood the inherent dangers of additional states making
nuclear fuels or using nuclear weapons-usable fuels, and how
inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)
could provide little warning of diversions of these materials and
activities to bomb-making.

For these reasons and others besides, they objected to
interpreting the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) as if
it recognized the per se right of signatories to make or stockpile
nuclear weapons-usable fuels. Here, they were attentive to the
notion, heralded in the NPT, that it was the "benefits" of peaceful
nuclear energy that were to be promoted, not money-losing,
dangerous activities that brought states to the brink of acquiring
bombs. That's why they made such painstaking efforts to clarify
which nuclear activities and fuels were economical and safe, and
which ones were not.

Finally, although the Wohlstetters were skeptical of arms
control and nonproliferation schemes that thought "minimum
deterrent" nuclear stockpiles were justifiable for states to threaten
each others' cities with, they were open to sounder arms control
proposals. Here, they felt more comfortable promoting restraints
that focused on economics and approaches that might increase
the number of states that could veto the access of nations to
dangerous materials and activities rather than elaborate civilian
nuclear supply "grand bargains" whose success depended on
unverifiable "peaceful" end-use pledges.

257

The analyses and key conclusions of the Wohlstetters are
still timely today. A brief review of their key works on nuclear
proliferation clarifies why.

N + 1 Problems.

Since 9/11, it's been fashionable to see U.S. nonproliferation
efforts as turning upon the distinction between friends and
adversaries. The United States should worry about hostile states
like Iran getting nuclear arms, it is argued, but support the nuclear
activities of possible friends, such as India. It makes sense to help
our Middle Eastern friends to develop "peaceful" nuclear energy,
but there is a problem with North Korea or Syria doing so.

This line of reasoning is plausible. The Wohlstetters certainly
were no friends of Communist North Korea or revolutionary Iran.
But to an extent rarely expressed in Washington today, they also
worried about friendly countries acquiring nuclear weapons.
As Albert made clear in "Nuclear Sharing: NATO and the N+1
Problem" (1961), alliance members that try to acquire nuclear
weapons, even with U.S. help, can significantly reduce alliance
cohesion and defense capabilities against first-tier competitors
(such as Russia and China today) or even second-tier competitors
(such as a possible nuclear-armed Iran). In his view, it was a major
mistake for the prospective or newly nuclear-armed state and its
friends to view proliferation as being a problem limited to the next
country that acquired nuclear weapons after them (that is, the "N
+ 1" problem country). Instead, in Albert's view, alliance and
security headaches arose from the prospective or newly nuclear-
armed state (or the "Nth" problem country) itself.

The Wohlstetters certainly were much more skeptical than
most officials and academics, then and today, of the ability
of smaller states — France in the 1960s, India in the 1970s, and
beyond — to make their nuclear forces any more than net liabilities
to a security alliance relationship. As Albert noted in Strength,
Interest and New Technologies (1968), Russia needed to dedicate only
a small percentage of its strategic offensive and defensive forces to
neutralize France's entire /orce defrappe. Moreover, France would
constantly be pressed financially and technologically to make its
nuclear forces even minimally credible without simultaneously
drawing down critical conventional force capabilities:

A small nuclear force ... is hardly likely to make any
country that has it the equal of any other in deterring at-

258

tack on itself. And the technological defects of small nu-
clear forces limit their potential for protecting their pos-
sessors indirectly by triggering one major power against
the other. However, even if these defects did not obtain
and any country with nuclear weapons could thereby
get direct or indirect protection for itself, there would
still remain the need to protect non-nuclear countries
from nuclear coercion. And giving bombs to everybody
hardly seems the way to do it.^

These points should raise more than a few questions for U.S.
and allied policymakers today. Just how much of a headache
might India and Israel create for the achievement of U.S. and
allied security goals because of their nuclear forces?^ What
assistance might each demand of the United States to maintain
their force's survivability and effectiveness against improved
Chinese and Pakistani forces and, in Israel's case, against its
neighbors with nuclear ambitions? Might Israel ask the United
States for intelligence or other help in bombing future threatening
"peaceful" nuclear sites in Iran, Syria, Egypt, or Saudi Arabia?
How critical might the American role be in keeping the peace
between New Delhi and Islamabad? Failing this, how automatic
might deterrence between India and Pakistan be? What advanced
offensive and defensive strategic weapons technologies might
India or Israel ask the United States to share in order to assure
these countries' nuclear strategic freedom of action? How much
assistance will the United States be asked to lend to the respective
conventional forces of India, Israel, and Pakistan as each of these
countries tries to cope with the constant technical and financial
demands of keeping their strategic deterrents credible against key
adversaries?

This, then, brings one to questions touching on U.S. foreign
policy. How might attending to these demands detract from other
U.S. -allied security objectives? Will India or Israel ever be able to
keep their nuclear forces sufficiently survivable or effective to suit
their own views of what is required for their national security?
How might trying to fulfill their requests for strategic assistance
(or failing to do so) affect Washington's ability to shore up allied
counterinsurgency, counterterrorism, and state-building efforts
in Iraq or Afghanistan, or America's need to maintain sound
relations with Pakistan in the war on terror? Given the questions
with these states, how eager should the United States be to humor

259

or support the military nuclear musings of Australia, Brazil,
Turkey, Ukraine, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, South Korea, or
Taiwan? What headaches for U.S. security might these nations'
efforts to go nuclear pose? Should we simply assume that these
nations will go nuclear no matter what we do, or should we
instead try to discourage them by offering — or strengthening
existing — security arrangements?

Safe or Dangerous?

The next set of issues that the Wohlstetters' nuclear studies
highlighted is the imprudence of nuclear-supplier states spreading
dangerous civilian nuclear technology under loose safeguards.
Here, the Wohlstetters were the first to seriously analyze and ques-
tion the nonproliferation merits of the Nuclear Nonproliferation
Treaty, the International Atomic Energy Agency's Statute, and
the IAEA's nuclear materials accountancy system.* None of these
nonproliferation^ measures, the Wohlstetters concluded, would
do anything but spread the means to make bombs unless they did
a much clearer job of defining what is — and is not— "peaceful,"
"beneficial," and "safe guar dable."

The Wohlstetters certainly were clear about the dangers of
allowing for the transfer of nuclear weapons-usable fuels and
nuclear fuel-making plants to states that did not have nuclear
weapons. They also were firm in their opposition to moving toward
commercial use of plutonium-based fuels, even if such fuels were
"lightly" irradiated to reduce partially their usability in weapons.
Today, the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP) proposes
to share virtually identical plutonium-based fuels. Such fuels, it
is claimed, can be made sufficiently "proliferation resistant." But
how likely is this? Already, the backers of GNEP promise only
to make fuels that might be difficult for terrorist organizations
to divert for bomb-making. GNEP fuel recycling, they concede,
would be risky to share with other states that do not already make
their own nuclear fuels because it might allow them to break out
and make bombs quickly.*

Then, there is the whole question of the ability of IAEA
safeguards to keep track of such fuel and fuel-making activities
in order to warn against possible military diversions in a timely
manner. The Wohlstetters were particularly wary of attempts
to use Article IV of the NPT to justify the further spread of
plutonium-based fuels, centrifuge plant technologies for uranium

260

enrichment, and reprocessing. It was fashionable in the 1970s, as
it is again today, to insist that the NPT recognizes that all states
have a per se right to any and all declared and inspected nuclear
technologies and materials so long as they have some conceivable
civilian application. Yet, as the Wohlstetters detailed in, "Signals,
Noise, and Article IV" (1979), for historical, technical, economic,
and legal reasons, asserting such a per se right is both dangerous
and untenable.

One reason why is the clear limit of protection that inter-
national inspections can afford against the diversion of civilian
nuclear programs to military uses. No inspections system, the
Wohlstetters noted, could possibly afford timely warning of
military diversions from fuel fabrication and production plants
where materials directly usable to make bombs were being
generated or handled. These facilities, and materials in them,
literally could bring states within days — or hours — of acquiring
nuclear weapons. Again, the only safe locations for such plants or
materials, the Wohlstetters noted, locations in states that already
had nuclear weapons.

Unfortunately, this point — which the Wohlstetters amplified
in "Spreading the Bomb without Quite Breaking the Rules" (1976),
Swords from Plowshares (1979), Towards a New Consensus (1979),
and many other works — has yet to sink in. President Bush, for
example, proposes to make nuclear fuel accessible at "reasonable
prices" to any states that do not now make nuclear fuel as a way
of discouraging them from making their own nuclear fuel. Both
the State Department and former Senator Sam Nunn, chairman
of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, back such fuel offers, along with
power reactor assistance in general. They warn, however, that we
will fail to get states to use such fuel services unless we reassure
them that by taking our assistance, they will in no way jeopardize
their "inalienable right" to make such fuel on their own if they
subsequently should choose to do so. European supporters of
such assurances even insist that offers of such assistance will be
believable only if the fuel is produced in facilities built in states
that don't currently make nuclear fuel.

None of this is likely to reduce the spread of nuclear weapons
capabilities. As the Wohlstetters noted in their analyses, there is no
reliable, timely way to detect military diversions from centrifuge
enrichment plants or reprocessing plants. These facilities could
quickly convert fresh or spent power-reactor fuel into bomb-
usable plutonium or uranium. Nor did the Wohlstetters see any

261

reliable way to prevent or detect in a timely manner the gradual
or quick diversion of nuclear weapons-usable and near weapons-
usable fuels to make bombs.

None of these points are getting their due today. There is
renewed interest in negotiating a "verifiable" military fissile
material production cutoff treaty, but there really is no way to
verify such a treaty effectively, not only because covert bomb-fuel
plants cannot be detected reliably, but because a military cutoff
treaty would still allow states to make nuclear fuel for "peaceful"
purposes. Insisting that these civilian plants can be safeguarded
in weapons states will inevitably lead nonweapons states to insist
that they can be safeguarded everywhere. Even now, one hears
desperate talk of somehow limiting Iran's nuclear enrichment
activities so that they might be safeguarded. Sadly, this is not
feasible.

For these and other reasons, the Wohlstetters were eager
to discourage states from pursing dangerous nuclear activities.
They also were skeptical of regionalizing them. Where were these
regional fuel-making centers to be located? Who would build,
run, and own them, and what would be charged for the fuel
produced? Would such services increase or decrease the number
of states that could acquire nuclear weapons, or simply be used
as yet another reason for states to acquire large, uneconomical
reactor programs of their own?

These questions bring us back again to current proposals
to make nuclear fuel available at "reasonable" prices from
international or regional nuclear fuel banks. Wouldn't subsidizing
the fuel simply encourage more states to pursue nuclear energy
programs? Each reactor would require tons of fresh low enriched
uranium, and would make many bombs worth of weapons-usable
plutonium annually. What would prevent these states from using
these materials to make highly enriched uranium or separated
plutonium? As already noted, the official U.S. position is that
all states retain their "right" to make such materials at any time.
What is to keep them from exercising this "right"?

Atoms for Peace.

This, then, brings us to a related problem that Roberta
Wohlstetter spotlighted in her detailed Energy Research and
Development Agency study. The Buddha Smiles: Absent-Minded
Peaceful Aid and the Indian Bomb (1976): the tendency of American
and allied officials to oversell the "control value" of various

262

civilian nuclear initiatives. This point is all too painfully clear
when examining the U.S. nuclear cooperation agreements and
disputes with India, which arose from Canada's and America's
concessionary diplomacy of the 1950s and 1960s. Here, American
and Canadian diplomats thought that they had secured clear,
"peaceful" end-use pledges from New Delhi that would prevent
India from ever misusing the nuclear goods that they might
receive. The pledges, instead, were fatally vague. India, in fact,
insisted that it had done nothing wrong in using this aid to
detonate what it called a "peaceful" nuclear explosive device.

Diplomatic failures of this sort — the result of haste and
inattention — are still prevalent today. Certainly, many of the
contentious Indian demands made during the 1950s and 1960s
regarding the CIRUS and Tarapur reactors are all too similar to
those more recently raised during the negotiation of the U.S.-
Indian civilian nuclear cooperative agreement. If the U.S. Execu-
tive Branch is not lucky, it may yet see India test nuclear weapons
and again have to defend such action against Congressional
demands that Washington suspend further U.S. nuclear co-
operation.^

This helps explain why the Wohlstetters were so hard-nosed
when it came to nuclear restraints and economics. They understood
the power of economics, and believed that it was a mistake for any
government to pay extra to produce strategic forces or nuclear
electricity or fuels if, in the process, it only reduced security. They
both went to great lengths to analyze the economics of different
types of nuclear power fuels and reactors, and to detail the high
economic and security costs of creating even a "small" nuclear
force.

This analysis complemented their insight that the best
proposals for restraint played to the natural tendencies of states
to defend themselves and to surrender only that which was safe
to give up. Rather than relying heavily on efforts to bribe specific
states into "doing the right thing" {e.g., Agreed Frameworks,
Iranian nuclear incentive packages, and other "grand bargains"),
the Wohlstetters preferred to develop country-neutral rules that
played to states' clear security interests.

In this vein, Albert sketched out a worthy proposal in a brief
memo entitled "Nuclear Triggers and Safety Catches, the 'FSU' and
the 'FSRs'" (1992). The memo addressed the potential problems
posed by Russian nuclear weapons in post-Soviet Ukraine. Albert
asks: Instead of trying to reduce the number of nations with their
finger on the nuclear "trigger" (i.e., demanding that Ukraine give

263

up its nuclear weapons to Russia), why not secure the weapons
and increase the number of states — starting with Ukraine, Russia,
and the United States — that would have a veto over the Ukraine's
ability ever to regain access to the weapons? In discussing this
idea further, Albert was quite willing to see his idea expanded
to cover other nuclear problem sets — for example, to weapons-
usable nuclear materials.* Why not get Japan, North Korea, and
China to surrender whatever direct-use nuclear materials they felt
comfortable to declare to be in surplus (including highly enriched
uranium, plutonium-based fuels, and separated plutonium) and
make access to this material by any of these states contingent
upon total agreement among and consent from all of these states?
Initially, one might simply put the material under safe storage
with state-of-the-art cipher locks. Later, one could remove the
material to some safer, more remote location {e.g., Greenland)
with much greater physical barriers and protections. The idea
would be to increase the number of states whose fingers would
be on the "safety catch" rather than reduce the number of states
whose fingers were on any nuclear trigger, and also to increase
the holdings kept under such safety arrangements.'

Conclusion.

Albert was fond of arguing that it would be nice if we could
somehow stop making our mistakes hereditary. What he was
referring to, of course, was the diplomatic tendency not only to
grandfather past errors, but to insist that we repeat them in the
future so that no one might notice the original mistake. What's
worrisome about this practice is that it generally works. In time,
we accept our past policy choices as absolutes and actually stop
thinking about reversing course — even when it makes sense to do
so.

There's no question but that if the Wohlstetters were
alive today, they would continue to push for clear changes in
U.S. and allied policies regarding civilian nuclear energy and
nonproliferation. They certainly would be dismayed by the
current enthusiasm to use plutonium-based fuels commercially
and to subsidize further capital-intensive nuclear energy projects.
They would object to the U.S. -Indian nuclear deal, as well as to
nuclear cooperative efforts with states in the unstable Middle
East, and would be sharp critics of the way the United States and
its allies have handled the North Korean and Iranian crises. What

264

would distinguish them from other such critics today, however,
would be that their objections would not be partisan, but would
be consistent with many decades of sound research. We could do
much worse than to read them either again — or for the first time.

ENDNOTES - Sokolski

1. E.g., see Brad Roberts, "Rethinking N + 1 Proliferation of
Nuclear Weapons," The National Interest, Spring 1998; and David
Santoro, "Of the Utility of the Non-Proliferation Regime: The
Essential Dialectic between Supply and Demand," in Strengthening
the Global Nonproliferation Regime: Views from the Next Generation,
Brad Glosserman, ed., Washington, DC: Pacific Forum CSIS Young
Leaders, May 2006, available from www.tinyurl.com/6hqak9.

2. See Albert Wohlstetter, Strength, Interest and New Technolo-
gies, opening address before The Implications of Military Technology
in the 1970s, the Institute for Strategic Studies' ninth annual confer-
ence, Elsinore, Denmark, September 28 to October 1, 1967, D(L)-
16624-PR, Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, January 24,
1968, available from www.rand.org/about/history/wohlstetter/
DL16624/DL16624.html. The address was also published as
Wohlstetter, Strength, Interest and New Technologies, in The
Implications of Military Technology in the 1970s, Adelphi Papers No.
46, London, UK: Institute for Strategic Studies, March 1968.

3. We have more than an inkling of what the Wohlstetters'
views of the Israeli and Indian nuclear programs were. In Moving
Toward Life in a Nuclear Armed Crowd? (1976), the Wohlstetters
were quite clear about the high costs and negative security
value of nuclear weapons for smaller states such as Japan. They
spotlighted the great expense smaller nations would have to pay
in order to make their nuclear forces truly survivable and effective
against large and small competitors. Regarding Israel, Professor
Wohlstetter published little but detailed before a student seminar
held in 1976 — years before it was publicly clear that Israel had
nuclear weapons — the "mistake" Israel made in acquiring its own
nuclear forces. His key arguments were that Israel would gain
little in possessing its own nuclear force, that maintaining sound
relations with the U.S. would otherwise provide security, and that
Israel would run severe strategic risks if these relations soured.
The reason why was simple: Israel (and other states, including

265

nations as large as Japan) could hardly make its nuclear forces
truly competitive against major powers, whose favor Israel's
security would ultimately rely upon.

4. The best known of these studies was Moving Toward Life
In a 'Nuclear Armed Crowd? a Pan Heuristics report completed for
the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency in 1976 and
subsequently published by the University of Chicago Press in
1979 as Swords from Plowshares: The Military Potential of Civilian
Nuclear Energy.

5. Albert Wohlstetter once warned his University of Chicago
class against thinking that "deterrence" was always a very clear
thought. "Turning a verb into a noun," he warned, "was rarely a
good idea." With this in mind, one would have to wonder about
the clarity of "nonproliferation," which is a verb ("proliferate")
turned into a noun, and with a prefix ("non") attached to it.

6. On these points, cf. the U.S. Department of Energy's
website, www. gne-p. energy. gov; Edwin Lyman and Frank von
Hippel, "Reprocessing Revisited: The International Dimensions
of the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership," Arms Control Today,
April 2008, available from www. armscontrol.org/act/2008 _04:/
LymanVonHippel.asp; and Committee on Review of DOE's Nuclear
Energy Research and Development Program, National Research
Council, Review of DOE's Nuclear Energy Research and Development
Program, Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2007,
esp. "Minority Opinion: Dissenting Statements of Gilinsky and
Macfarlane," pp. A1-A6, available from www.nationalacademies.
org/morenews/20071029.html .

7. On these points, see Victor Gilinsky, "Nuclear Consistency:
"The U.S.-India Deal and Our Approach to Rogue Nuclear Powers
Is Threatened by Double Standards," National Review Online, April
30, 2007; and Roberta Wohlstetter, The Buddha Smiles: Absent-
Minded Peaceful Aid and the Indian Bomb, PH-78-04-370-23, final
report prepared for the U.S. Energy Research and Development
Administration in partial fulfillment of E (49-l)-3747, Los Angeles,
CA: Pan Heuristics, November 15, 1976, revised November
1977, available from www.npec-web.org/essays/19771100-RW-
BuddhaSmiles-Revised.pdf, courtesy Joan Wohlstetter.

266

8. Author's private conversation with Albert Wohlstetter at
his California residence, spring 1992.

9. This idea should be seen as still ahead of its time. A
similar proposal recently was suggested by Robert Einhorn at an
international conference hosted by the Nuclear Threat Initiative
and the Norwegian Government held in 2008 in Oslo, Norway.

267

Nuclear Sharing: NATO and the N + 1 Country (1961)
Albert Wohlstetter

On July 24, 2009, the copyright permission expired for SSI's web-
site posting of this Foreign Affairs article. Although this article has
been removed from the online version of Nuclear Heuristics, the
text of this article is available in the hard copy version of the
book. For more, visit www.alhertwohlstetter.com.

Spreading the Bomb without Quite Breaking the Rules (1976)

Albert Wohlstetter

From Foreign Policy, No. 25, Winter 1976, pp. 88-94 and
145-179. Courtesy of the Wohlstetter Estate.

The basic problem in limiting the spread of nuclear weapons
is that in the next 10 years or so many countries, including many
agreeing not to make bombs, can come within hours of a bomb
without plainly violating their agreement— without "diverting"
special nuclear material and, therefore, without any possibility of
being curbed by "safeguards" designed to verify whether material
has or has not been diverted.

This development would lower the political and economic
price of nuclear weapons and at the same time greatly increase the
incentives to acquire them. The legal acquisition of concentrated
fissile material by regional powers will increase the desire of
regional adversaries to do the same. Such a development is
encouraged by the incoherence and carelessness of the policies of
the United States and other nuclear exporters which allow material
easily turned into bombs by government nuclear laboratories to
be used or produced during the course of civilian research or the
generation of electricity.

The problem in the present export rules can be made vivid by
a comparison. Under these rules a non-weapon state can come
closer to exploding a plutonium weapon today without violating
an agreement not to make a bomb than the United States was
in the spring of 1947, when the world considered us not only
a nuclear power but the nuclear power. The plutonium bombs
of the time were primitive in design and crated in knockdown
form. The very bulky high explosives had to be glued together
piece by piece with slow-drying adhesives to form an implosion
system. The fusing and wiring circuits were much more primitive
than those commercially available today, and even a skilled team
would have required several days to put a weapon together. In
the spring of 1947, moreover, we had no skilled teams. Yet some
believe our nuclear force to have been the main obstacle to an
adversary reaching the English Channel, and others believe it to
have been the backup for "atomic diplomacy." It should make
suppliers thoughtful that their nuclear exports might bring a non-
weapon state closer to exploding a plutonium bomb today than
the United States was in 1947.

301

The Incoherence of Current U.S. Policies

From the outset of the nuclear age it has been clear that design-
ing a bomb and getting the nonnuclear components are much
easier than getting fissile material in high enough concentration for
an explosive. Research on bomb design and testing of nonnuclear
bomb components are not prevented by agreements on nuclear
cooperation, and can proceed in parallel with the accumulation
of fissile material. Fissile uranium (in particular, uranium-235)
or fissile plutonium (especially plutonium-239) concentrated
enough to need no isotope separation^ and only a modest amount
of chemical separation are then the main hard steps on the way to
a nuclear bomb.

The fresh fuel used in the present generation of power reactors
is either natural uranium, which is almost all uranium-238 with
less than 1 percent of the fissile isotope uranium-235, or low
enriched uranium with only 3 percent to 4 percent of uranium-235.
Such fresh fuel with less than 20 percent of uranium-235 cannot
be used in an explosive without isotopic separation. But the
irradiated or "spent" uranium fuel contains, along with other by-
products, significant quantities of plutonium which result from
the absorption of neutrons by the uranium-238. The plutonium
so generated along with electricity has upward of 70 percent of
the fissile isotopes of plutonium and requires no isotopic, but only
chemical separation to be used in an explosive. Some "critical
experiments" use large amounts of plutonium and uranium in
metal form needing little further change.

To avoid putting fissile, that is, readily fissionable, material
into the hands of non-weapon states, we deny licenses on
facilities for isotope separation which could produce highly
enriched uranium. So also on reprocessing plants for chemically
separating plutonium. In the nuclear suppliers group, according
to news accounts, we argue in principle against any other country
making such exports even under International Atomic Energy
Agency (IAEA) "safeguards." While we so far haven't won on the
general principle, we have successfully opposed French sales of
reprocessing plants to Taiwan and South Korea. And though not
successful in our opposition, we say we objected to the German
sale of enrichment and reprocessing plants to Brazil as well as to
the French sale of a reprocessing plant to Pakistan. We used to
refuse to license the export of uranium enriched to more than 20

302

percent in uraniuin-235, whatever the inspection arrangements.
All of this recognizes, sometimes explicitly, that safeguards imply
timely warning and that material that is weeks, days, or hours
from incorporation in a bomb therefore cannot be effectively
safeguarded.

On the other hand, we have for some time exported to non-
weapon states, for use in research, both separated plutonium and
highly enriched uranium, which bring them closer to the bomb
than do the facilities for separating such material. For example,
from mid-1968 to spring 1976, we exported 697 kilograms of highly
enriched uranium and 104 kilograms of separated plutonium to
Japan and 2,710 kilograms of highly enriched uranium and 349
kilograms of separated plutonium to the Federal Republic of
Germany.

And we continue to offer nuclear assistance to countries that
plan to acquire fissile material, and even to a country like India
which has already detonated a nuclear explosive in defiance
of explicit Canadian and U.S. statements over the past decade
that no nuclear explosive is exclusively peaceful within the
meaning of their agreements on nuclear cooperation. We say
that that is what our agreements have always meant (and it is
indeed their commonsense implication),^ and we try to make
this obvious meaning explicit in new agreements. Nonetheless,
for old agreements we content ourselves with statements of U.S.
unilateral understandings on this subject, and continue nuclear
exports to countries that have refused to endorse our unilateral
interpretation.^

The State Department assures the Congress that such uni-
lateral understanding is binding enough, but after the Indians
made a nuclear explosive using Canadian and U.S. peaceful
assistance, we denied that the Indians had violated anything
but the Canadian unilateral understanding and went through
extraordinary contortions to hide the fact that they had used U.S.
heavy water. We raised no objections when the French sold a
reprocessing plant to Japan. Indeed, in 1972, before that sale,
we had authorized U.S. companies to sell a reprocessing plant to
Japan under stricter safeguards than the Japanese were willing to
accept, but apparently no stricter than those they actually accepted
later for the French sale.

Our policies at that time did not recognize, as they do now, that
the sale of reprocessing plants is mistaken even if safeguarded. The
South Koreans observe that we treat Japan differently from them

303

when it comes to reprocessing. The French comment sardonically
that we make a great fuss about the sale of a reprocessing plant to
Pakistan, even though our representative to the IAEA approved
the Agreement between Pakistan, France, and the IAEA on the
transfer and safeguarding of that plant. And apparently not all
American officials, and evidently not the most important ones,
opposed the West German sale to Brazil in tones audible at the
highest level of the German government. Chancellor Schmidt
told the press in June 1975 that he regretted criticism by U.S.
journalists and politicians but that "he knew of no criticism by the
U.S. government."

We get then the worst of both worlds: In the end we refused
to supply reprocessing or enrichment facilities to the Brazilians,
knowing that though nominally civilian, such facilities could
bring Brazil close to a bomb. But because we never formulated a
coherent policy explaining that, it was easy for the Federal Republic
to tell itself that we were simply sore losers in a business deal and
that clinching the deal by giving the Brazilians a "sweetener" in
the form of the principal ingredient of a nuclear explosive was
perfectly all right.

Our agreements on nuclear cooperation abound in clauses
that presume that the importing country will separate and recycle
plutonium and that stocks of plutonium may in principle be
effectively safeguarded. Moreover, we have talked of separating
and recycling plutonium as if they were essential to the future
of nuclear power both here and abroad, and have allowed the
myth to persist that power-reactor plutonium cannot be used as
an explosive. We have recently made the recycling of plutonium
a "key initiative" in our energy conservation program. The
Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has only recently shown
signs of considering the international consequences of recycling
to be a factor in the U.S. decision to license it domestically. As for
uranium, sometime in the 1960s our attention wandered and we
began to ship highly enriched uranium to non-weapon countries.
We appear to have shipped some five tons overseas — perhaps 300
bombs worth of readily fissionable material. Our confusion has
been durable and bipartisan.

How We Got Into This Fix

The extensive fundamental overlap of the paths to nuclear
explosives and to civilian uses of nuclear energy has been
recognized since the mid-1940s.* The "heart of the problem" of

304

international control, according to Robert Oppenheimer, was
"the close technical parallelism and interrelation of the peaceful
and the military applications of atomic energy." We have almost
from the start said that the military and civilian atoms were
substantially identical yet, paradoxically, that we wanted to stop
one and to promote the other. The paradox was present in the
Truman-Atlee-King Declaration of October 1945, and we made
our most valiant effort to reconcile these opposing aims in the
Acheson-Lilienthal Report and the Baruch Plan of 1946.

The Acheson-Lilienthal Report tried to resolve the dilemma
by proposing to "denature" plutonium: that is, to spoil it as an
explosive. This was to be accomplished by leaving the fuel to be
irradiated in the reactors long enough so that the fissile isotope,
plutonium-239, generated in the uranium fuel rods, would in turn
generate a large portion of higher isotopes of plutonium and, in
particular, a large fraction of plutonium-240, which had serious
drawbacks from the standpoint of the art of weapons design of
the time. The idea had been advanced in March 1945, by Leo
Szilard, quite tentatively. (The troubles with plutonium-240 had
been discovered only in the summer of 1944.) The Franck Report
proposed denaturing less cautiously in June 1945.

Discussion was necessarily muted and limited by the
requirements of secrecy, by the bounds of the current state of
the art, and by the limitations of current understanding of that
state of the art. The initial report was predicated on the belief that
denaturing would interpose the high barrier of isotopic separation
between the use of plutonium for civil and military ends. This,
given the elaborate mechanism of international control called for
in the Acheson-Lilienthal Report, would assure some two to three
years warning. The report itself exhibited some uncertainty and
ambivalence^ about the hope for denaturing and the hope was
almost immediately modified by a committee of distinguished
Manhattan Project scientists to suggest that such plutonium could
be used in a weapon, but would be very much less effective.* Even
the qualifications immediately introduced, we now know, were not
strong enough. Yet the initial hope for denaturing has generated
a long and inconsistent traiF of statements which still have their
effect in encouraging the belief that plutonium left in the reactor
long enough to become contaminated with 20 to 30 percent of the
plutonium-240 or plutonium-242 would be unusable or, at any
rate, extremely ineffective when used in a nuclear explosive. Since
power reactors operated "normally" were expected for reasons

305

of economics to achieve maximum "burnup" of fuel by leaving
the fuel rods in the reactor long enough to so contaminate the
rods, a kind of denaturing was hoped for as a result of standard
procedures. However, this hope turned out to be a slender reed.

The Baruch Plan would have given sovereign states control
only of "safe" civilian activities. They would have gotten all of
their fissile material in denatured form, separated from spent fuel
in plants owned by an international authority. That authority was
to have a monopoly of all "dangerous" activities: that is, all those
that could quickly be turned to the manufacture of explosives.
The plan rejected as unworkable any reliance on inspection rather
than on ownership and control of dangerous activities.

The Soviets turned down the Baruch Plan. Since then we
have come to rely on exactly the scheme regarded as unworkable
by the authors of the Acheson-Lilienthal Report and the Baruch
Plan. We rely in essence only on accounting and inspection of
dangerous activities in non-weapon states. We are encouraged
to do so by remnants of the belief that plutonium from a power
reactor is not very dangerous.

But why was it important that plutonium be made safe
for civilian use? The short answer is that we were powerfully
impelled after the horrors of Hiroshima to believe that nuclear
energy had a constructive use in electric power as spectacular
as its use in military destruction. And we believed, on the basis
of our initial understanding of the scarcity of uranium, that
plutonium was essential to the future of nuclear electric power.
The known reserves of natural uranium in the late 1940s were
a mere 2,000 short tons. Since natural uranium contains only a
tiny fraction of the fissile isotope, uranium-235, converting the
more abundant uranium-238, which is not itself fissile, into fissile
plutonium seemed a logical way to extend the scarce supply
of fissile material for electric power. (From the first, we had
contemplated using plutonium not only in breeders, but also in
present-day reactors.)

And the natural impulse to find civilian use for this enormous
force led statesmen frequently to talk as if the civilian use were
a substitute for the military one: The more we used atoms for
peace, the less we would use them for war. We subsidized the
spread of civilian nuclear technology not simply in the hope for
spectacular economic benefits, but as if it were a decisive measure
of nuclear disarmament. We dispersed "research" reactors in the
Third World as a substitute for sending a symbolic "atomic peace

306

ship" around the world rather than as a matter of hard economics
for development, and were embarrassed to find that we had made
it a matter of international prestige to have a research reactor,
even for countries that had no trained personnel to use it. We
made concessionary loans for power reactors almost as tenuously
based in economics, and we did this as if they were necessarily
advancing the cause of peace.

Robert Oppenheimer was quite right in saying that, unlike
the Acheson-Lilienthal Report or the Baruch Plan, the Atoms
for Peace program had no "firm connection with atomic
disarmament" and that its bearing on the prospect of nuclear
war was "allusive and sentimental" rather than "substantive
and functional." This symbolic use of atomic energy antedated
the Atoms for Peace program and relates to our earliest habits of
talking about promoting the peaceful uses of the atom as if they
would automatically displace the military use.

However, it can be said of the pioneers of the nuclear age
that though they sometimes talked as if there were a dichotomy,
they also saw that the heart of the problem was a large overlap
between civilian and military applications of nuclear energy, and
they grasped very firmly the point that keeping the two sorts of
activities separate means more than simply detecting a violation
of an agreement. It means early detection of the approach by
a government toward the making of a bomb in time for other
governments to do something about it. This principle has been
reaffirmed recently by the president, by the assistant administrator
for national security of the Energy Research and Development
Administration (ERDA), and by the inspector general of the IAEA.
But, in practice, the point has a way of getting lost in the middle
reaches of both national and international bureaucracies.

It was only to be expected that over two decades of Atoms for
Peace programs would result in the formation of large groups of
professionals in industry, in nuclear engineering departments of
universities throughout the world, in governments, and in regional
and international agencies. All of these groups have a strong
interest in the "enlargement and acceleration" of the use of nuclear
energy and a much milder concern with such long-term problems
as the disposal of radioactive waste or the spread of nuclear
explosives. They tend to identify any restraints to control the
dangers of proliferation as simply — dread word — "antinuclear."
The hostility has been worsened by some of the extremists of the
environmentalist movement, who seem dedicated to stopping and

307

dismantling all civilian nuclear power rather than controlling its
dangers and encouraging the development of safe forms of nuclear
and nonnuclear energy. The nuclear energy faction inside large
industrial corporations in turn feels embattled by any attempt at
further restriction, precisely because reactor manufacture has so
far involved great business losses in spite of subsidy. The nuclear
debate degenerates into a dog fight between extremes, with the
accusations by Squeaky Fromme and the Manson Family about
a nuclear power conspiracy almost mirrored in the dark hints by
the beleaguered industrial bureaucracy.

For example, delegates to a meeting in Vienna last spring of
the International Union of Producers and Distributors of Electrical
Energy suggested that the holdups in separating plutonium to
"close" the fuel cycle are due to "subversive elements" at work
among groups opposing nuclear development.* At a conference
in Diisseldorf earlier that week the chief executive of VEBA,
a leading West German energy concern, indicated that the
nuclear opposition was heavily backed with cash "from across
the border."' But from the standpoint of reactor manufacturers
whose profits are all still in the future, less sales promotion and a
more sober look at the social and even the entrepreneurial risks
would be salutary for the industry itself. Treating as the enemy all
doubters of nuclear market and cost-benefit studies encourages
badly timed investments and the present industry troubles.

However we got into our present fix, we still have to ask what
the fix portends for the future of proliferation, if we do nothing.

Is the Spread Likely?

Past predictions of immediate spread have, for the most part,
been false alarms. So, immediately after the war, scientists who
had figured in the Manhattan Project predicted that, unless there
were very drastic international controls, bombs would spread
rapidly. Harold Urey forecast a half dozen countries entering the
nuclear club in as few as five years. Irving Langmuir predicted
that Russia would get nuclear weapons very quickly, but would
be beaten in the race by Canada and England. And the general
public reflected this pessimism. Intelligence estimates in 1948
were more hopeful (excessively so in predicting when the Soviet
Union would get the bomb), but official predictions have had
their ups and downs.

A second flurry of alarm came in the late 1950s as the military

308

potential of the Atoms for Peace programs began to be visible.
Officials predicted, for example, that not only Canada and
Sweden would get nuclear weapons in the early 1960s but, unless
there were a multilateral nuclear force. West Germany would too.
Perhaps the best known study done then was by the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Planning
Association (NPA): it suggested that without international
control there might be as many as 10 new nuclear powers in five
years. This study was summed up somewhat incautiously by C.P.
Snow's famous statement in 1960 that all physical scientists "...
know that for a dozen or more states, it will only take perhaps six
years, perhaps less" to acquire fission and fusion bombs. Nothing
of the kind happened. By comparison with these early alarms,
the actual increase in the number of countries testing nuclear
explosives has been very slow. Three additional countries tested
at intervals of eight, four, and 10 years in the 22 years following
the British nuclear explosion.

There is a lesson to be drawn from a close examination of these
past apocalyptic predictions. They assumed essentially that, in the
absence of some quite extreme and politically implausible change
in circumstance, countries that could get nuclear weapons would
do so, and would do so more or less in the order of their technical
and industrial competence. The incentives and drawbacks for
proceeding with a nuclear weapons program were in all essentials
neglected. However, political will is the key, rather than mere
competence. The demand for weapons was softened by a system
of working alliances and explicit or implicit guarantees that
applied to most of the then likely prospects for an independent
nuclear capability. The price and risks in undertaking a nuclear
weapons program were also higher than most of the prophets
had recognized. It is important today, as then, to look soberly at
incentives and disincentives for the spread and how they might
be affected. We should not easily assume inevitability.

Some students of proliferation, however, observe that three
countries tested in the first decade, two in the second, one in
the third, and are made excessively cheery by the diminishing
sequence. But changes are taking place beneath the placid surface,
which is presently undisturbed by new countries testing weapons.
These changes are much less cheering. Under the present rules,
civilian nuclear energy programs now under way assure that
many new countries will have traveled a long distance down
the path leading to a nuclear weapons capability. The distance

309

remaining will be shorter, less arduous, and much more rapidly
covered. It need take only a smaller impulse to carry them the rest
of the way. There is a kind of Damoclean overhang of countries
increasingly near the edge of making bombs.

For convenience, distinguish three conditions in which
plutonium might be found in the course of generating nuclear
electric power. The first is the accumulation of plutonium in
irradiated or "spent" uranium fuel which is now a normal by-
product of any operation of our current reactors. The second
condition, much closer to being usable in a nuclear weapon, would
be that of plutonium in fresh mixed plutonium and uranium
oxide fuel rods. Even if a country did not separate plutonium
or manufacture such mixed oxide fuel rods itself, it could have
plutonium in this second form in reloads of mixed oxide fuel at
the input end of reactors. Plutonium in the third condition would
be found already separated in the form of plutonium dioxide or
plutonium nitrate. In this form, it could be found at the output end
of a separation plant, or at the input end and in stocks-in-process
in facilities that manufacture mixed plutonium and uranium fuel
rods. Plutonium in these three conditions comes successively
closer to a nuclear explosive. The last two conditions need occur
only if plutonium recycling becomes general.

At present, our agreements on cooperation in general leave
title to the spent fuel and all its products in the importing country.
For governments accumulating the spent fuel, the barrier to
obtaining a high enough concentration of fissile plutonium will
be the need to separate the plutonium chemically. This is a less
formidable obstacle than isotopic separation, the facility for which
costs billions of dollars using present techniques and would take
years to construct. Nonetheless, chemical separation is substantial
barrier and perhaps the most important one remaining, if nuclear
suppliers do not secure the return of spent fuel. Getting spent
fuel is a considerable stride along the road to nuclear weapons,
compared to the position of the weapon states which started
from scratch. But spent fuel still needs to be reprocessed, and
that involves delay and then remote manipulation of extremely
toxic, radioactive substances, facilities with six or seven feet of
shielding, lead glass windows, etc. Tons of spent fuel must be
handled to produce kilograms of plutonium.

At the other extreme is the plutonium that would be stored
at the output or "back" end of reprocessing plants and at the
input or "front" end of plants fabricating plutonium or "mixed
oxide" fuel. Such plutonium in the form of plutonium dioxide

310

or plutonium nitrate could be converted to plutonium metal
using generally known methods and without remote handling
equipment or extensive shielding and the like, but only a glove
box. It should take no more than a week in a facility covering
3,600 square feet and costing about $1,400,000.

Plutonium would also be found, if it is recycled, in fresh
unirradiated fuel rods at the input end of the reactor. Extracting
plutonium from such mixed oxide fuel would be very much
easier than taking it out of the irradiated spent uranium fuel.
Plutonium is more concentrated in the mixed oxide fuel rods (4.5
percent compared to .7 percent). Unlike irradiated fuel, it is not
highly radioactive and would require no delay, no "hot cells"
with heavy shielding, no remote manipulation, and no removal of
fission products. A facility for separating 5 kilograms per day and
converting it to plutonium nitrate might exist in a 1,400 square foot
laboratory and might cost $235,000. This is trivial by comparison
with the cost of a facility for deriving comparable quantities of
plutonium nitrate from the spent uranium fuel. The latter might
cost from $75 million to $100 million. The difference is important,
because today many proposals would ban separating plutonium
in non-weapon states, but not recycling it in mixed plutonium and
uranium fuel. So, for example, early drafts of U.S. agreements of
cooperation with Egypt and Israel.

We can measure the advance toward the ability to man-
ufacture nuclear explosives implicit in recent civilian nuclear
electric programs, as of 1975, by showing first the number of
countries, including the present weapon states, that would have
enough separable but possibly unseparated plutonium for a few
bombs between now and 1985. Second, the large number of
countries with various quantities of plutonium in fresh reloads
of unirradiated plutonium fuel if plutonium recycling should
become general, and even if these countries do not themselves
separate plutonium or manufacture plutonium fuel rods. Third,
the number of countries that have planned to have a capability to
separate that much plutonium by 1985. The results of these three
sets of calculations are displayed respectively in Figure 1, Table 1,
and Figure 2.

311

FigurA 1

The overhang of countries with enough
■eparebte Plutonium for piimitivaar •mall
mllltBrv forest

Vertical scale: number of countries

pbionium iQt 3-6 nuctear

A CauntfiBs havmg separable
plulonium lor SO-SOnuclear
weapons''

^CQunifLat that have Bxplod^d
a nuclear device

'25 kg o1 pjulonnum which
mighl provide enough bombs
for InsirBSQrlu&ein
a n tipopu lai lOi^ i t ^ ack s

' 250 kg of plu tool urn which
mighi provide enough bombs
t<i call fOT more syste malic
■ntegraiLon into a military
force

"A»Limei linear increase at
the same rate as the past

1945 50 55 '60 65 70 75 80 85 90

Figure 1.

312

Tabk 1

Plutonium Available
from Reloads of Mixed Plutonium
and Uranium Oxide (mox) Fuel

in the Early 1990s*

kg of Pu' Number of
(Plutonium) Bombs' Worth''

Austria

400

Belgium

2,800

325

Brazil

500

West Germany

11,700

1,357

India-:

360

Iran

3,200

371

Italy

2,100

244

Japan

9,000

1.044

South Korea

900

104

Mexico

800

Netherlands

400

Philippines

1,000

116

Spain

5,600

650

Sweden

4,800

557

Switzerland

3.200

371

Taiwan

3,200

371

Yugoslavia

500

Egypt

700

* i/iing only indigcnouily produced piutonium and
asiuminf that onr rdoad is attvayi ktpt at each cmc-
for, Antf cou.fttry without its own MOX futl fobrico'
tion faciiities could justifif nochinij one reload. A
iingh MOX reload migbi contain i56-90O kg of plu-
torttun7 (40 to 104 bombs worth). Countries that
fabricate MOX fuel WQuid hat^ stiti men plutaniwrn
ovaitablr in procets^

^Aauming ?S0 hg ptr i.OQQ megaufatt boiling water
reactor reload and 770 kg ptr I.OOQ tnegawntr prrt-
iiirized water r*flf ror reload, tirjtar scaling for other re^
dffdr iizei. See L^5. Atomic Entrgg Commasion,
Generic EnvHimmcriai Stilcmcnt Mixtd Oxide Fuel
(GESMO), Voi. III. August 1^7 4, p. IV C-65.

° S,62 kg Pti pte bomb asiutning 5kg ^sstte Pu/bomb
and asiuming MOX Pix la 5S per f^nf fiixile Pu-

'^ The figures for India are tht remit of dirett taitutti-
lion.

Table 1.

313

Figure 2

Countries planning to have plants for
■sparating plutonium orenriching uranium in
quantities enough for several bombs

Vertical scale: number of countries

^Frsnca
'United Kingd!»m
USSfl
Jnifait StitBS

1945 50 '55 '60 '65 70 75 80 '85 90
# Countries that have exploded a nuclear device

O Countries having reprocessing facilities and
separable plutonium for 3-6 nuclear weapons

O Countries having reprocessing facilities and
separable plutonium for 30-60 nuclear weapons

£i Countries having uranium enrichment facilities

'There is no hard evidence that Israel has a
reprocessing plant. The date shown for Israel is
arbitrary

—Assumes linear increase at the same rate as the past

Figure 2.

The first thing to be said about the numbers in these charts is
that they are very large ones. Chemical separation of plutonium
and the enrichment of uranium are civilian activities which have
long been regarded as "normal," if not yet operational, parts of
the nuclear electric fuel cycle. They may sometimes and in some

314

places be discouraged by various ad hoc national policies, but
they have not been subject to a clear-cut international or universal
national prohibition by supplier countries. The problem of
inhibiting or reducing the size of this burgeoning capacity is not
merely then a matter of an improved watch, to see that a clearly
agreed prohibited line is not crossed. Among other things it would
involve defining and moving such a clearly agreed boundary to
preclude activities which cannot provide adequate warning. And
for whatever dangerous activities remain on the permissible
side of the agreed boundary, we need to elaborate a consistent
national policy to discourage them and encourage other safer
alternatives.

The second thing to be said is that this large growth is not
inevitable. It presumes the carrying through of plans, negotiations,
and constructions not yet firmly committed; some, like the
Korean and Taiwan separation plants, have had setbacks. The
growth, moreover, is open to further influence, a subject for the
elaboration of policy of supplier as well as recipient governments.
But American influence on the policies of various importing and
exporting countries is limited by the confusion and arbitrariness
of our policy on access to fissile material. Figures 1 and 2 and
Table 1 are not unconditional forecasts, but indications of what
may happen if conditions are not altered.

The gist of these figures is that, under the present rules of the
game, any of a very large number of countries may take these
further long strides toward the production of nuclear weapons
in the next 10 years or so without violating the rules — at least no
vigorously formulated, agreed-on rules.

These paths toward producing weapons are in addition to
paths which exploit the weakness of sanctions against breaking
the Treaty on Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) or
bilateral rules, and in addition to paths open to those governments
which have not ratified the NPT. Extending the NPT to more
countries or increasing the efficiency of "safeguards" or physical
security measures would not, therefore, block these paths. The
recent interest in measures against "diversion," while useful in
itself, distracts attention from the steady spread of production
capacities within the rules.

Some part of the stocks of fissile material might always be
diverted within the limits of error of material unaccounted for
by any inspection system. In the future, when these stocks are
very large, diverting even a small percentage would yield sizable

315

absolute amounts. This tends therefore to be the focus of most
attention. Yet it is much less important than the possibility of
piling up significant stocks of fissile material legally, without
diversion, for use later in explosives.

I have distinguished for convenience four kinds of nuclear
explosive capacity. The first is the sort of capacity which has been
much in the public eye in the last year or two, due especially to
the efforts of Dr. Theodore Taylor to make clear its dangers. It
would consist in the manufacture of a crude device derived from
stolen fissile material, perhaps not using plutonium metal, but
plutonium dioxide powder, yielding as little as 10 or 100 tons of
energy, and designed for terrorist use by some nongovernmental
group, or possibly even a single individual. It might use poorly
separated material and be dangerous not merely if exploded in
anger, but to store and handle.

The second capacity would rely on a few explosives, perhaps
implosion weapons in the kiloton or greater range. They might
be used by governments as a desperate last resort threat against
populations (or transferred by some governments to terrorists).
The third capacity I have taken arbitrarily as consisting in perhaps
50 such devices, enough to call for plans to incorporate them into
a military force. The fourth would be much more sophisticated. It
is the kind that an industrial power like Japan might contemplate,
if it made the decision to become a military nuclear power in the
1980s or 1990s. It would require very sophisticated fission and
fusion weapons with predictable yields and with more advanced
and protected delivery capabilities.

This article focuses especially on the second sort of capability.
It imposes no stringent requirements for delivery. (These require-
ments are very stringent for a middle power to get a serious and
responsible force in the 1980s.) I do not, however, mean to imply
that the capacity to produce a few bombs for use as a last resort
will actually realize the hopes some government might place in
it. It is likely to be extremely inflexible, vulnerable, and available
only for suicidal use. Nonetheless, some governments might take
this route.

However, the nuclear energy bureaucracy, and statesmen
informed by it, have been cheerfully arguing that the recycling of
plutonium will not make the spread of weapons more likely. Their
arguments are residues of the initial faith in denaturing. They
are saying that power reactor plutonium would be contaminated
in normal reactor operations and abnormal operations would be

316

quickly detected and punished; that power reactor plutonium
cannot be used as an explosive; or if so used, it would be
ineffective, with generally low yields and highly variable ones;
that only sophisticated nuclear weapon countries like the United
States and the Soviet Union, with many years in the business,
could so derive weapons that have any genuine military use; and
finally, with a touching bathos, that power reactor plutonium is
anyway less than optimal for weapons.

It is surprising that the faith in denaturing of plutonium,
however plausible initially, could have survived for more than
three decades. Since this belief explicitly or implicitly rationalizes
so much carelessness, it is important, before putting it to rest,
to offer some current examples. "Both Framatome and French
officials," according to Nucleonics Week, June 3, 1976, "deny the
[South African] deal is conducive to weapons building. 'The
worst way to make a bomb is to buy an LWR (light water reactor)
for 5 billion francs,' commented Leny. Abourdarham [also of
Framatome] added, 'To get clean Pu-239 from our type of reactor,
you'd have to lower the burnup rate and discharge the reactor not
once a year but about twice a month.' The higher the burnup the
more contaminated the spent fuel is with Pu-240." The new French
foreign minister, while ambassador to the United Nations, told the
Security Council flatly that plutonium so derived "could not be
used for military purposes."^" In Germany, officials of Kraftwerk
Union have suggested that weapons-grade plutonium must be 98
percent pure plutonium-239, and that anything less could be used
not in a military weapon, but only in "terrorist explosive devices"
of low and uncertain yield, which in any case would be extremely
hard for terrorists to make." The Swedish government committee
on radioactive wastes (the Aka Committee) reports that "The
plutonium . . . produced in Swedish power reactors contains as
much as 25 percent to 30 percent of plutonium-240 [and] . . . can
only be utilized in weak and probably unreliable nuclear charges
of highly questionable military value. "^^

In the United States, the president of the Atomic Industrial
Forum says that if nuclear reactors are "run on an economic fuel
cycle — that is, long irradiation times — the plutonium produced
is readily used only for making explosive devices which are
hardly military weapons. "^^ He goes on to suggest that only very
sophisticated weapons countries like the United States and the
Soviet Union are able to overcome the difficulty by special design.
The Forum's Committee on Nuclear Export Policy concludes that

317

we should promote peaceful nuclear electric power only to the
extent consistent with the goal of eliminating proliferation, but
they do not think that should impose much constraint, since,
"... power reactors are not a practical or economic vehicle for
producing weapons-grade plutonium. The processing of fuel
from a power reactor at low irradiation levels would be costly
and revealing of intentions, thus jeopardizing the supply of new
fuel. On the other hand, the use of reactor-grade plutonium of
high irradiation levels for weapons purposes presents formidable
technical challenges."^*

And finally American government officials in agencies
granting loans and subsidies to countries like India which have
or propose to get reprocessing plants take comfort from the fact
that, "While the plutonium produced by these reactors could be
used in an inefficient and unsophisticated explosive program, it
is not optimum material for explosive uses because of the high
percentage content of the nonfissionable plutonium isotope
plutonium-240 ." ^^

But all of this is quite misleading. For one thing, a non-
weapon country can operate a power reactor so as to produce
significant quantities of rather pure plutonium-239 without
violating any agreements or incurring substantial extra expense.
This would involve departing from theoretical "norms" for
reactor operation, but a look at the actual operating record of
reactors in less developed countries suggests how theoretical these
norms are. Even in America in the early 1970s, leaking fuel rods
caused Commonwealth Edison to discharge the initial core of its
Dresden-2 reactor early, with nearly 100 bombs-worth of 89 to 95
percent pure fissile plutonium.^'' (In India, as of September 1975,
97 percent of the fuel discharged from its Tarapur reactors had
leaked.) Countries like Pakistan and India, with smaller electric
grids and poorer maintenance, have operated much less and much
more irregularly than the steady 80 percent of the time originally
hoped for; and have irradiated their fuel and contaminated the
plutonium in it less. Since it is neither illegal nor uncommon to
operate reactors uneconomically, governments may derive quite
pure plutonium-239 with no violation nor much visibility.

What is more, there is plainly a considerable latitude in the
degree of purity actually required for explosives. The discussion in
the European nuclear industry frequently assumes that "weapons-
grade" plutonium must be 98 percent pure plutonium-239.^^ In
this country, however, under present classification guidance.

318

the fact that plutonium containing up to and including 8 percent
plutonium-240 is used in weapons is unclassified as is the fact that
more than 8 percent plutonium-240 (reactor-grade) can be used to
make nuclear weapons.

Most significantly, 20 years of Atoms for Peace programs have
dispersed well-equipped and well-staffed nuclear laboratories
among nonnuclear weapons states throughout the world. (For
example, by 1974 the United States alone had trained 1,100 Indian
nuclear physicists and engineers. The Shah of Iran plans to
have 10,000 trained.) Many of these laboratories would be quite
capable of designing and constructing an implosion device and of
studying its behavior by nonnuclear firings. It is true that if they
were to use power reactor plutonium with 20 to 30 percent of the
higher isotopes, they would be likely to obtain a lower expected
yield and a greater variation in possible yields than if they should
use more nearly pure plutonium-239. (Of course a nonnuclear
component could fail, but this has nothing to do with the grade
of plutonium used.) However, they could build a device which,
even at its lowest yield level, would produce a very formidable
explosion. This may be seen from the record (now public) of the
characteristics of the Nagasaki plutonium bomb.

The Fat Man and the Little Boy

The first American implosion design, "Fat Man," was
used in the Trinity test and the Nagasaki bomb. It had a finite
probability of predetonating even though it used an extremely
high percentage of plutonium-239. Plutonium-239 itself emits
neutrons spontaneously, though five orders of magnitude less
so than an equal quantity of plutonium-240. More important,
though the Trinity and Nagasaki devices used exceptionally pure
plutonium-239, they had a significant fraction of plutonium-240.
They had a definite chance, then, of detonating prematurely, that
is, between the time the rapidly assembling fissile material first
became critical and the time that it might have arrived at the
desired degree of supercriticality; and the less supercritical, the
lower the yield.

In a memorandum to General Farrell and Captain Parsons
immediately after the Trinity test, and before the use of Fat Man at
Nagasaki, Oppenheimer wrote, "As a result of the Trinity shot we
are led to expect a very similar performance from the first Little
Boy (the gun-assembled uranium weapon used at Hiroshima) and

319

the first plutonium Fat Man. The energy release of both of these
units should be in the range of 12,000 to 20,000 tons and the blast
should be equivalent to that from 8,000 to 15,000 tons of TNT.
The possibilities of a less than optimal performance of the Little
Boy are quite small and should be ignored. The possibility that
the first combat plutonium Fat Man will give a less than optimal
performance is about 12 percent. There is about a 6 percent
chance that the energy release will be under 5,000 tons, and about
a 2 percent chance that it will be under 1,000 tons. It should not be
much less than 1,000 tons unless there is an actual malfunctioning of
some of the components. . . ." (italics added)^*

Indeed General Groves, like Oppenheimer writing between
the Trinity test and the actual use of the implosion weapon at
Nagasaki, anticipated an increase in the fraction of plutonium-240
in later weapons. He wrote, "There is a definite possibility, 12
percent rising to 20 percent as we increase our rate of production
at the Hanford Engineer Works, with the type of weapons tested
that the blast will be smaller due to detonation in advance of the
optimum time. But in any event, the explosion should he on the order
of thousands of tons. The difficulty arises from an undesirable
isotope which is created in greater quantity as the production rate
increases" (italics added)."

The essential point to be made is that even if a device like
our first plutonium weapon were detonated as prematurely
as possible — at a time when the fissile material was least
supercritical — its would still be in the kiloton range. Apart
from a modest degradation in the quality of the fissile material
employed, and hence in the size of the expected yield, all that a
higher fraction of plutonium-240 in such a first implosion device
could do is increase the probability of obtaining a yield smaller
than the optimal, but still as large or larger than that already
enormously destructive minimum.

The lowest yield of such a weapon can by no stretch of the
imagination be called "weak." Moreover, by comparison with the
average or even the maximum yield possible in that implosion
design (or by any standard), it would by no means be contemptible.
In fact, only 7 months before Trinity, the first implosion weapons
were expected to yield much less than one kiloton.^" A reduced
yield would not mean a proportionate reduction in damage. The
area destroyed by blast overpressure diminishes as the two-thirds
power of the reduction in yield, and the reduction in prompt
radiation— which is the dominant effect on population of a low-

320

yield weapon — is even smaller. (If the expected yield were eight
kilotons, and the less probable but actual yield were "merely" one
kiloton, the blast area would be reduced not by seven-eighths, but
only by three-fourths and the region in which persons in residential
buildings would receive a lethal dose of prompt radiation would
only be halved.) The lethal area would still be nearly a square
mile.

Variability in yield would be a drawback for an advanced
industrial country preparing the sort of force I have referred
to as of interest to an industrial power like Japan in the 1980s
or 1990s. Such a power might want a theater weapon that
minimized collateral damage if only for the protection of its own
troops. However, for a last resort weapon used against a distant
population, it is important only that the blast effect of the yield be
formidable; and if in fact more destructive energy is released than
anticipated, this would only reinforce the destruction intended.

Finally, the variations in damage due to differences in the
purity of the plutonium are likely to be much less than the variation
in damage due to the differing operational circumstances in the
use of the weapon. The Nagasaki plutonium implosion bomb
had an estimated yield of 21 kilotons. The Hiroshima uranium
gun weapon is now estimated to have released 14 kilotons. Yet,
due to differences in terrain, weather, accuracy of delivery, and
the distribution of population, the Hiroshima bomb killed twice
as many people as the Nagasaki weapon.

As for the argument that military men would never use a
device whose result was not precisely predictable, this is not very
persuasive. If so, military men would hardly ever enter battle.
The uncertainties of surviving ground attack, of penetrating air
defense, and of delivering weapons on target are cumulatively
larger than the uncertainties in the yield of a bomb made with
power-reactor plutonium. Plans for delivering the first nuclear
weapons were going forward before any test, and during a period
when the Manhattan Project scientists had highly varied estimates
of their yield.

In sum, no one should believe that power-reactor plutonium
can be used only in a feeble device too unreliable to be considered
a military weapon, or that recycling plutonium is therefore safe.

Recently, as some of the examples I have cited suggest, the
bureaucracy has taken a slightly different tack: power-reactor
plutonium can be used as an explosive, it is admitted, but would-
be nuclear countries won't use it that way. They can get better

321

plutonium more cheaply and easily by buying reactors specifically
for the purpose of producing plutonium and not for generating
electricity. However, if one already has paid for an electric
power reactor, the relevant economic figure is not the total, but
the marginal, or extra, cost to get bomb material, given the fact
that one has paid anyway for the reactor. In fact, if recycling
is accepted as essential for the fuel cycle, the cost of separation
plants would be charged to the generation of electricity and would
involve no incremental cost for getting separated plutonium for
weapons. Getting impure plutonium in this way would be nearly
costless. Getting a significant quantity of rather pure plutonium
would involve some fuel and operating costs, but these would be
small by comparison with the expense of a program to produce
and separate plutonium exclusively for weapons.

The more important costs are political for any program
designed overtly to get plutonium for a weapon. That could be
why the Pakistanis, the Koreans, the Taiwanese, and others deny
that they are doing any such thing. It would hurt them militarily,
economically, and politically. They can more easily get the
financial and technical assistance and trading relations necessary
for a power reactor. The political costs would be high for the
exporting country too.

Finally, what the bureaucracy seems to miss altogether is that
a non-weapon state under the present rules can proceed down
the path toward making a weapon without deciding to do so
in advance. It doesn't have to start out as a "would-be nuclear
country." It can change its mind or it can make up its mind later.
It doesn't have to get a production reactor.

Of course a production reactor might be disguised as a vague
sort of "research" reactor, though this is likely to yield smaller
quantities of plutonium. In fact, the rules governing research
reactors and "critical experiments" have been even more careless
and need tightening even more than those governing power
reactors. But this second line of argument is hardly a cheery
confirmation that the rules make the spread unlikely. It has the
opposite sense. It has led industry representatives to suggest that
the spread is inevitable "sooner or later" and we will just have to
live with it.^^

322

Would the Spread to More Countries be Bad?

As we and other supplier countries continue to subsidize
the export of materials, equipment, and information needed
for making nuclear explosives, the bureaucrats in industry and
government associated with these programs tend more and more
to tell themselves and everyone else that the spread of nuclear
explosives may not be so bad after all: governments that get
nuclear weapons will themselves behave more cautiously; their
nuclear weapons will inspire caution in their neighbors; this in
turn might free the United States from the burden of defending
some troublesome allies.

However, the spread of nuclear weapons to many countries
will disperse not only instruments of deterrence and prudent
behavior, but also means of coercion and reckless or deliberate
devastating attack. Not all threats of nuclear aggression will be
neatly offset and canceled by convincing promises of nuclear
response. The risks will rise very high. In unstable parts of
the world, the disasters possible in short conflicts will increase
enormously. In the Middle East, for example, before outside
powers could stop the conflict, as a result of an exchange
involving a few bombs the Arabs might suffer several million and
the Israelis a million dead in contrast with the thousands killed
in the October war. In a conventional war, it takes a very long
time or huge resources to kill the number of people that would
be destroyed by a few nuclear weapons in a matter of hours.
The spread of nuclear weapons will reduce our ability to control
events. It will have a dissolvent effect on alliances, expose our
own forces overseas to huge new risks, and ultimately impose
large costs in shaping our own offense and defense to protect the
continental United States against small terror attacks by national,
as well as subnational groups. Even distant small powers using
freighters and short-range missiles, such as the Soviet SCUD, will
be within system range of the United States.

Even if such a development were, as it is claimed, inevitable
"sooner or later," later would be better than sooner, and less better
than more.

What Can We Do to Limit or Slow the Spread?

The characteristic view in the bureaucracy is that we have
no leverage. We can't prevent foreign suppliers from selling nor

323

importers from buying nuclear technology on terms even less
constraining then ours. It's unfair then to burden our nuclear
exporters. Besides, we can retain our influence on non-weapon
states only by continuing to supply them with nuclear services,
equipment, and materials without interruption.

There is an obvious muddle in the bureaucracy's view that
we can't influence events on the one hand, but on the other hand
that we do have an important influence that we can retain only
by continuing to export and — to make the muddle muddier — by
continuing to export to buyers, no matter what their behavior, no
matter what moves they make toward nuclear explosives. For the
bureaucracy, in short, we can retain our leverage only it we never
use it. A lever is a form of abstract art rather than a tool giving us
a mechanical advantage.

All this is plainly disingenuous: We've talked of the inevitable
while actively promoting nuclear energy in non-weapon states in
forms that permit access to readily fissionable material, subsidizing
the financing of these sales, giving away research reactors with
highly enriched uranium cores, assisting "critical experiments"
that involve hundreds of kilograms of separated plutonium and
highly enriched uranium, urging that non-weapon states recycle
plutonium, training engineers from non-weapon states in how to
separate plutonium, arguing for domestic recycling as an essential
to the future of all nuclear electric power, and in general setting
an example to non-weapon states that suggests that the stocking
of fissile material is both necessary and safe.

The State Department argues that we must supply nuclear
services, equipment, and material "reliably"— by which it means
that we should supply them steadily and indiscriminately to
importers who do and to those who do not live up to an obligation
to avoid getting explosives, or materials quickly convertible to
nuclear explosives. Such "reliable" supply, it claims, will enable
us to influence the importers. Exactly the opposite of the truth.
Importers will be influenced to stay away from stocks of explosive
material only if it costs them something not to do so, and only if
our threats or sanctions are taken seriously. The Indian use of
Canadian and American help for "peaceful uses only" in order to
make nuclear explosives illustrates the point marvelously. The
Indians guessed right in not taking the constraint seriously. Their
explosion inspired only ingenious apologies for them in our State
Department.

324

One token of our lack of seriousness is the piecemeal way we
decide on licensing exports without considering the cumulative
effect of our own and other suppliers' individual decisions in
enabling an importing country to get explosive material. For
example, we limit the amount of highly enriched uranium in the
core of an individual research reactor we have given away, but
place no constraint on the total amount of highly enriched uranium
the importing country might gather from several sources. In this
and other ways, we set a confused and incoherent example for
other suppliers.

But other supplying countries have an interest in avoiding
the spread of weapons to more states. The French government
doesn't like the prospect of Spanish nuclear weapons, and neither
the Germans nor the French could afford explicitly to use bombs
as sweeteners for reactor sales, even if they wanted to. The French
and Germans point out correctly that they now impose more
stringent safeguards on exports than the IAEA requires, but they
do not recognize, nor do we point out, that safeguards cannot be
effectively applied to fissile material only a few hours away from
a bomb; that is, such "safeguards" cannot give timely warning.

The principal precondition for us to influence other suppliers
as well as importers is a clear, consistent policy: a set of signals
which are green on some activities, red on others. We now flash
red, yellow and green on practically everything.

But there are clear signals we can send and effective levers
we can press. On the political and military side, we can help
countries defend themselves against nonnuclear attack without
resort to nuclear weapons. Our military sales program should be
designed to discourage a nuclear defense and to make nonnuclear
defenses more effective. And our alliance policy can strengthen
guarantees against nuclear adversaries. For example, we can
supply the South Koreans with improved short-range surface-
to-air missiles and short-range precision guided nonnuclear
weapons, and discourage their attempts to convert Nike Hercules
into 200-mile surface-to-surface rockets which would be effective
only with nuclear warheads and only against population targets.

On the economic side, we can design our export and export
financing policy to affect an importing country's energy program
considered as a whole, not piecemeal, by encouraging the use of
nonnuclear energy and of comparatively safe forms of nuclear
energy and by discouraging or penalizing the dangerous forms of
nuclear energy that permit access to fissile stocks.

325

The effectiveness of the levers at our disposal can be illustrated
by the extreme sensitivity of various programs in the non-weapon
states of the Third World (where the impending spread is now
most threatening) to simple alterations in the terms of financing.
Korea, for example, has drastically cut back its nuclear program
in response to a slight hardening in Canadian and American
financial terms. And the effectiveness of our political and military
levers is illustrated by the cancellation of the Korean reprocessing
plant.

In sum, statements that we have no leverage mean that we
don't want to press the levers we have, that we are not serious
about proliferation. We don't think about the international
consequences of digging ourselves deeper into a commitment
to recycle plutonium, for example, by bailing out Allied General
from its costly investment in reprocessing at Barnwell. We prefer
to hang on to some quite inessential outworn conceptions of the
nuclear fuel cycle and we are moving toward competing with the
French and the Germans by giving away para-bomb capabilities.

Other governments have reason to doubt our claim that
we unequivocally oppose proliferation. But actions against
proliferation do cost something. It is only fair to ask whether they
are worth the cost.

Will Slowing the Spread Cost More than It Is Worth?

Slowing the spread means reducing the demand for nuclear
weapons by intelligent policies of alliance and of military sales
and assistance. It means reducing the supply of nuclear weapons
materials by sensible nuclear energy policy for our domestic as well
as our foreign sales. On the supply side in particular, restrictions
are often thought of as depriving us and other suppliers of
enormous market benefits and imposing energy shortages on all
of us, including the Third World countries now in the market for
nuclear energy that is at least overtly civilian.

Nuclear energy has an important role to play, but its positive
contributions will not make the difference between heaven and
hell on earth. Its benefits have been puffed up from the start
in ways that have greatly distorted its performance and made
national energy programs follow something much less than the
best path and timing for introducing nuclear energy into the total
energy mix. A more sober program would benefit the security
interests of the United States and ultimately the economic interests

326

of the industry. Without the extensive conversion of uranium-238
into plutonium and the separation of plutonium from spent
fuel, we can have enough coal and enough of the fissile isotope
uranium-235 at reasonable prices to last us well into the second
quarter of the twenty -first century. By then we should be able to
make an intelligent transition to the use of abundant or renewable
resources: a safe and economic breeder; or a safe form of fusion; or
solar energy, whether in the form of solar electric power, biomass,
or some other. We have time.

The contrary claim that we need immediately to add to
the reserves of uranium-235 by the extensive use of separated
plutonium in the current generation of light water reactors, and
that we should now contract into the early use of the plutonium
breeder, is based on bad economics. It ignores the way an increase
in market prices generates a larger supply of specific scarce
resources (by making them worth finding and exploiting), or a
supply of substitutes, and at the same time reduces the demand.

In fact, the nuclear industry has suffered chronically from
premature commitments based on exaggeration of energy
demand, the demand for electric power, in particular the
demand for nuclear electric power, and the derived demand for
uranium and for enrichment services. This exaggeration applies
to overseas as well as to domestic demand. And the impression
of crisis has been encouraged further by understatements of the
supply that might be made available at various prices and by the
discouragement of supply that has followed from the wild swings
in demand when excessive hopes have been deflated. In 1975,
the AEC predicted 450 GWe^^ of nuclear capacity operating in the
United States in 1985. In 1970, it predicted 300 GWe by that date.
Today, on the basis of actual construction and orders, the Federal
Energy Administration (FEA) expects 145 GWe or less. Given
varied technical assumptions appropriate for the dates when the
forecasts were made,^^ these predictions imply a cumulative need
respectively for about one million, 500,000, or 220,000 tons of fresh
uranium yellow cake if there is no recycling. The 80,000 tons that
would be needed annually by the year 1985, if the AEC's 1970
nuclear power forecasts were right and we did not recycle, far
exceeds the supply of low cost uranium that might be available at
that time. The 33,000 tons that would be needed to fulfill the more
sober FEA schedule during the year 1985 is quite in line with what
is in prospect. ERDA has estimated that a rate of 33,000 tons can
be available in the early 1980s at the low forward cost of $15 per
pound. ^■^

327

Much the same can be said about inflated forecasts of the
need for uranium enrichment services; and about the longer
term forecasts until the end of the century for both uranium and
enrichment. European, Japanese, and Third World nuclear power
forecasts have been similarly inflated. In 1957, Euratom forecast
about 15 GWe of nuclear power in 1967 and about 50 GWe in
1975. In actuality there was 1.6 GWe in 1967 and at the end of
1976 there will be only about 12.2 GWe.^' The Japanese in 1970
expected 60 GWe by 1985. They have officially cut this to 49 GWe
and some Japanese experts expect it to be as low as 30 GWe.

The nuclear bureaucracy believes that overstating demand is
much less harmful than understanding it.^* This is not so. The
exaggeration has severely damaged both national policy and the
profitability of industry. Exaggerated uranium demand biases
decisions toward plutonium recycling in the current reactors as well
as in breeders. The inflated domestic demand for enrichment led
us in 1974 to ban any new enrichment commitments to foreigners.
This led to the present scramble overseas to get enrichment
capabilities independent of the United States with an obvious
resulting loss of U.S. control. Inflated market expectations have
also cost the industry money. Chronic premature commitment
has meant, in the United States, a loss to General Electric of $500
million to $600 million on 13 turnkey contracts; a loss of $.5 to
$2 billion by Westinghouse depending on how it settles the legal
claims of public utilities on its forward sale of uranium that it used
to sweeten its reactor sales. Royal Dutch Shell and Gulf Oil, the
two owners of General Atomic, have lost over one billion dollars
on the latter's high temperature gas-cooled reactor.

It is hard to disentangle losses on commercial nuclear sales
in company statements that, in general, merge those losses
with profits on fossil fuel plants, military nuclear sales, or other
industrial products. But it appears that Babcock and Wilcox,
and Combustion Engineering, the other two major U.S. reactor
manufacturers, have suffered respectively a cumulative loss on
nuclear sales of about $100 million and $150 million; for 1976
each will have an estimated $10 million pre-tax loss. General
Electric' s pre-tax loss on nuclear sales in 1976 will be about $40
million. AEG Telefunken, part owner of Kraftwerk Union, lost
DM 685 million ($274 million) on nuclear sales in 1974, and
expected losses in "three figure millions" marks in 1975.^^ It is
harder to determine Framatome's losses. As for reprocessing of
light water reactor fuel, though very little has been performed, the

328

losses have been impressive. General Electric's Morris, Illinois,
plant which cost $64 million had to be abandoned without ever
going into operation.^* The Allied General Nuclear Services plant
at Barnwell, owned by Allied Chemical, Royal Dutch Shell, and
Gulf Oil, originally estimated to cost about $50 million actually
has cost $250 million so far, and may take about a billion dollars
in total to complete in accordance with current requirements.
Getty's Nuclear Fuel Service plant in West Valley, New York, shut
down for modification after about $30 million in gross sales. It
might require some hundreds of millions just to dispose of the
radioactive waste from its previous work. Getty wants to cancel
some $180 million in reprocessing contracts it has accepted,
since it estimates it will take $600 million to fulfill the contracts
within regulatory requirements. The government-owned plant
in Windscale, England, had troubles with the head end. The
Eurochemic plant in Belgium has been shut down, and Europeans
now judge that the recycling of plutonium will exceed the cost
of getting fresh uranium fuel and that if reprocessing should be
necessary for waste disposal, it will require subsidies from public
utilities.^'

In general it is plain that for the nuclear industry as a whole,
profitability is still a vision of the future. Immense losses could be
avoided by greater realism.

The collapse of expectations in domestic markets unfor-
tunately has led to an aggressive campaign to sell to the less-
developed countries (LDCs), where, in general, nuclear power
is least economic: Nuclear electricity is highly capital intensive,
efficient only in very large sizes and requires continuing highly
sophisticated maintenance. The LDC reactor market, which the
industrial powers might fight to share, is quite small, and the
market for reprocessing plants is even smaller — 1 percent or
2 percent of the reactor market. The heavily subsidized initial
sales have been made on terms which worsen the problem of
proliferation without any realistic prospect that the ambitious
LDC long-term nuclear programs will be fulfilled. Yet in the past
the French have talked of sales to the Third World of plutonium
breeders which are more damaging and even less plausible for
LDCs than the present generation of reactors which [the breeders]
will exceed in capital costs, diseconomies of small scale, and
sophistication.

The most urgent issue, if we are to restrict access to fissile
material, is the use of plutonium as a fuel in current reactors.
This has been argued for on grounds that it would (1) save a

329

lot of money, (2) save much scarce uranium, (3) be essential for
permanent disposal of radioactive wastes, and (4) be required
now in order to get the plutonium breeder on present schedules.
None of this is true. On the first point, the estimates of costs
for separating plutonium and making it into fuel rods have
multiplied tenfold in 10 years and are still highly uncertain and
in controversy. On Vince Taylor's calculations, they exceed the
estimated costs of fresh uranium fuel rods. Most important, even
if plutonium separation were costless, it could make only a 1
percent or 2 percent difference in the delivered kilowatt hour cost
of nuclear electricity.

As for point two, the conservation argument should be related
to the economics: We are not impelled to extract plutonium from
spent uranium fuel any more than we are presently moved to
extract the enormous quantities of uranium from sea water. It
depends on the costs. Fissile material is present in spent fuel in
more concentrated form than in ore, but, by comparison with
uranium ore, it is enormously radioactive. There are cheaper
ways of getting uranium, by mining and even by a change in U.S.
enrichment policy. (In unpublished work, Vince Taylor of PAN
Heuristics has shown that the apparent uranium shortage of the
1980s has been effectively created not only by inflated projections
of nuclear power and the derived demand for uranium but also by
U.S. policies that (1) envision adding substantially over the next
10 years to an already immense government stockpile — worth $8
billion at current prices — of enriched and natural uranium, (2)
leave an excessive amount of uranium-235 in the waste streams
of the enrichment plants, thus inflating the amount of natural
uranium that must be fed into the plants, and (3) force customers
to stick to schedules for delivering uranium for enrichment which
they contracted for before the recent substantial cutbacks in
nuclear power programs both here and abroad.) But even if one
were absurdly optimistic about the costs of using plutonium fuel
for light water reactors, the private cost savings would be trivial.
The political and social costs plainly dominate.

As for point three, plutonium separation would remove most
of the longest-lived radioactive actinides, and so, it has been
hoped, would economize in packaging and compacting wastes.
However, spent uranium fuel can be stored without reprocessing
and recent study indicates that the process of separation will
contaminate much of the equipment, filters, solvents, etc. used and
that the total volume and heat content of the waste so created and

330

of the spent plutonium fuel which will require remote handling
and geologic isolation will exceed those of the unreprocessed
spent fuel.

On point four, the present schedule calls for ERDA recom-
mendations on a commercial breeder in 1986. If the decision is
positive, it is hoped that the first commercial breeder will start
operating in the mid-1990s. We can, therefore, defer the decision
on plutonium separation for at least five years. ^^ In fact, the spent
fuel would cool enough in that period to make separation easier
and the savings would nearly pay for the storage costs. This fourth
argument is, however, revealing. It is motivated in good part by
a desire to force a positive decision on a commercial plutonium
breeder — another case of premature commitment. The domestic
U.S. decision on plutonium separation has obvious international
implications and it is these that will impose the largest political
and social costs.

Policies

The last year has seen a salutary ferment about changing
policy so as to discourage nuclear proliferation. Proposals range
from David Lilienthal's recommendation at one end, to stop all
nuclear exports, through the bureaucracy's at the other, which
suggests that we continue pretty much as we are. Rather than
engage in a detailed analysis of this wide range of proposals, I
will set down summarily a program indicated by my argument
so far.

On the Demand Side

Slowing the spread of nuclear weapons means reducing the
demand for them as well as restricting the supply of nuclear
weapons material. Political and military policy on alliances,
on nuclear guarantees, and on non-nuclear military sales and
assistance should be directed to help in non-nuclear defense
against non-nuclear threats and to provide nuclear guarantees
against threats of nuclear coercion or attack. I have illustrated
the sort or thing needed in my earlier remarks about South Korea.
But such a policy has to be shaped country-by-country and does
not lend itself to easy summary.

331

On the Supply Side

1. Deny access to readily fissionable material. We need to
state as a general guide for U.S. domestic as well as export policy
that it is our plain purpose to deny access by individual terrorists,
either here or abroad, and to deny access by governments of non-
weapon states to nuclear materials that can be readily converted
to explosive use. This principle should be the basis for our
negotiations in the suppliers group where we will then be able to
say we not only advocate it but illustrate it. The general principle
has implications spelled out in many more detailed policy
suggestions.

2. Delay for at least 5 or 10 years any decision to separate
plutonium in the United States.

3. Press actively for fuel cycle designs which would eliminate
access to highly enriched uranium or chemically separated
plutonium in power reactors and research reactors. Up to now,
this has not been part of any design criterion.

4. Continue to deny export licenses for isotope enrichment
facilities and plutonium separation plants.

5. Provide to any non-weapon state low-enriched uranium
services at nondiscriminatory prices provided that the importer
agrees (a) not to acquire further enrichment facilities or plutonium
separation facilities, (b) to place all its nuclear facilities under
IAEA safeguards, (c) not to acquire nuclear explosives, and (d)
not to acquire fissile material quickly convertible to explosive
use. We should make new commitments for the sale of nuclear
technology only under these conditions. Though we have no
shortage of enrichment capacity, it may be prudent to expand our
enrichment capacity because it is critical for exercising control,
and for assuring supplies of low-enriched uranium to importers
who live up to their agreements. We should alter our perverse
enrichment policy which has done much to create the appearance
of a shortage of uranium and of enrichment. We should first
start to reduce our $8 billion stock of natural and low-enriched
uranium; second, permit customers to cancel or defer dates for
delivering uranium to be enriched; and third, start operating
our enrichment plants, subject to capacity constraints, so as to
minimize the amount of uranium needed to produce nuclear fuel
for our customers.

6. Where we supply low-enriched uranium to non-weapon
states, either lease it or otherwise arrange for its return. (The Soviet
Union apparently does this.) Spent fuel so returned would make

332

up a small percentage of the enormous radioactive wastes from
our military program and our own domestic power program.

7. In the future, when centrifuge or laser separation facilities
might otherwise become widespread, consider transfers of
enrichment technology to an international or multinational
center that would provide only low-enriched uranium (and not
plutonium fuel) services to non-weapon states. However, do not
encourage plutonium separation in such centers with or without
the fabrication of mixed plutonium and uranium oxide fuel. If
such centers shipped out separated plutonium to non-weapon
states, it would be immediately available for explosives. And
plutonium is much more easily separated chemically from fresh
unirradiated mixed oxide fuel than from spent fuel. Low-enriched
uranium is not an explosive. Plutonium separated from reactor
fuel is.

8. Deny further assistance for critical experiments in national
laboratories of non-weapon states, since these experiments
involve access to unirradiated or only lightly irradiated, readily
fissionable material. Where warranted, provide for U.S. or
possibly multinational or international facilities for the conduct of
critical experiments by non-weapon states.

9. Deny licenses for the export to non-weapon states
of research reactors with highly enriched uranium cores or
significant plutonium output unless the total nuclear program for
an importing country will not permit it to derive enough readily
fissionable materials for weapons.

10. Change Export-Import Bank policy so that its loans and
the private loans it guarantees will support rather than defeat the
preceding recommendations.

11. Offer further financial and technical assistance to IAEA
to improve safeguards, but alter trilateral agreements to permit
and require IAEA to report on the location, size, and chemical
and physical composition of all stocks of readily fissionable
material monitored under these agreements. The improvements
in IAEA inspection to detect violations will be useful if, and only
if, export agreements are altered so that accumulating readily
fissionable material becomes a violation, whether accounted for
or not. Presently, IAEA centers its attention on the "limits of error
in material unaccounted for" ("LEMUF" in the jargon) without
reporting on the legal accumulation of explosive materials.

The best maxim to keep in mind is that of Florence Nightingale:
"Whatever else hospitals do, they shouldn't spread disease." On
these complex issues it has been all too easy to advance resounding

333

programs to slow the spread of weapons which actually speed
it. That is how we got into the present fix. So Atoms for Peace,
and so some of the incompatible clauses of the NPT. Using the
eighteenth century language of natural law from our Declaration
of Independence, the NPT asserts the "inalienable right" of all
countries to peaceful nuclear energy — which includes, some
exporters apparently feel, reprocessing. We have then the new
natural right to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Plutonium.

And now most recently each side in the last presidential
campaign showed how the multinational form can distract from
substance in slowing the spread. Each sometimes contemplated
not only the return of spent uranium fuel but using multinational
centers for making and distributing fresh mixed plutonium and
uranium oxide fuels. Yet, plutonium for use in explosives is
much more easily extracted from the fresh mixed oxides than
from the spent uranium fuel. The word "multinational" tends
to give many opponents of the spread a warm feeling all over,
unless it is followed immediately by the word "corporation." But
this cure would simply spread the disease. Here it is essential to
focus our aim precisely on the substance rather than the symbol.
Multinational centers for the distribution of bomb material will
not help.

ENDNOTES - Wohlstetter - Spreading the Bomb

1. Isotopes of the same heavy element, such as uranium-235
and uranium-238, undergo the same chemical reactions at almost
the same reaction rates and therefore cannot be separated by
any known conventional chemical means, but so far only by an
expensive, difficult, and time-consuming physical process that
exploits slight differences in atomic mass. The fissile isotopes are
those that are readily fissionable by slow or thermal neutrons as
well as fast neutrons.

2. U.S. Senate, Committee on Government Operations,
Hearings on S. 1439. testimony by Robert J. McCloskey,
Department of State, June 16, 1976, p. 811.

3. Indeed, we attached a "related note" to our agreement with
Spain of March 20, 1974, which said, "It is understood that the
material subject thereto will not be used for any nuclear explosive
device, regardless of how the device itself is intended to be
used. . . ." We signed the note, but Spain did not.

334

4. For a more extended analysis, see Chapter III of Moving
Toward Life in a 'Nuclear Armed Crowd? a Pan Heuristics report to
the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. A revised edition
will be published by the University of Chicago Press.

5. For example, it said "... the development of more ingenious
methods . . . which might make this material effectively usable is
not only dubious, but is certainly not possible without a very major
scientific and technical effort" (pp. 26-27), but also unequivocally
that "the limit between what is safe and what is dangerous . . . will
not stay fixed" in "what is sure to be a rapidly changing technical
situation" (p. 30). U.S. Department of State, Publication 2497,
March 16, 1946.

6. The committee included Oppenheimer and C. A. Thomas,
who among the authors of the Acheson-Lilienthal Report were
the two qualified to speak on the subject. Its statement was issued
on April 9, 1946.

7. The ambivalence and inconsistency were present at the
start. Like Szilard, who had been cautious about denaturing a
few months earlier, Glenn Seaborg, whose team had discovered
plutonium in 1941, signed the final draft of the Franck Report
which stated flatly that "denaturalization of pure fissionable
isotopes . . . [would] make them useless for military purposes."
Yet Seaborg, commenting on early drafts, had written, "Can't
denature 49 by dilution with stable isotopes." "Forty-nine" was
the wartime code for the element 94, plutonium. The James Franck
papers. University of Chicago Regenstein Library.

8. "Nuclear Experts Give Warning on Build-up of Untreated
Waste Fuel," The Times, London, May 25, 1975.

9. Guy Hawtin, "East Bloc Aids Bonn Anti-Nuclear Groups,"
Financial Times, London, May 22, 1976.

10. Address by Louis de Guiringaud, June 19, 1976, New York:
Service de Presse et d'lnformation, 1976, No. 76/95, p. 3. In September
1976 the French cabinet reconsidered such dangers, though not as
a result of any clear message from the State Department. Michel
Tatu, Le Monde, September 9, 1976.

335

11. Lecture entitled, "The Fuel Cycle and the Export Situation,"
by Dr. G. Hildebrand, to visiting embassy representatives at the
Kraftwerk Union plant in Miilheim, West Germany, on April 30,
1976.

12. "Spent Nuclear Fuel and Radioactive Waste," Statens
Offentlige Utredningar, Document No. 32, Stockholm:
Libervorlag, 1976, p. 43.

13. Carl Walske, "Nuclear Energy Environment in the United
States," a paper presented at a conference in Madrid, Spain, May
4, 1976.

14. The Atomic Industrial Forum's Committee on Nuclear
Export Policy, U.S. Nuclear Export Policy, July 21, 1976, p. 3.

15. Letter to Congressman Findley from Denis M. Neill,
Assistant Administrator for Legal Affairs, Agency for International
Development, Department of State, August 18, 1975.

16. The spent fuel had 13 kg of plutonium that was 95 percent,
110 kg that was 93 percent, and 331 kg that was 89 percent purely
fissile.

17. Hildebrand, op. cit.

18. Memorandum from Oppenheimer to Farrell and Parsons,
23 July 1945, Top Secret; Manhattan Engineering District Papers,
Box 14, Folder 2, Record Group 77, Modern Military Records,
National Archives, Washington, DC. Declassified in 1974.

19. Memorandum to the Chief of Staff by General Leslie
Groves, 30 July 1945. Ibid., Box 3, Folder 5B. Declassified in
1972.

20. See Richard G. Hewlett and Oscar F. Anderson, Jr., The New
World, 1939/1946, Volume I, A History of the United States Atomic
Energy Commission, University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State
University Press, 1962, p. 321.

21. See, e.g., Walske, op. cit., and Hildebrand, op. cit.

336

22. "GWe" means gigawatts, that is, thousands of megawatts
of electrical capacity.

23. Estimates of uranium requirements vary with precise
assumptions as to the percentage of uranium-235 left in the tailings
by the process of enrichment, the rate of growth in reactors, the
capacity factor or percentage of time the reactors are generating
electricity; and such technical characteristics of reactor operation
as fuel enrichment levels, fuel burnup levels, and frequency of
reloads. These earlier estimates assume 80 percent capacity
factors. The 1976 forecast assumes a 70 percent capacity factor. I
assume .2 percent tails assay throughout.

24. John Patterson, chief of the Supply Evaluation
Branch, Division of Fuel Cycle Production, "Uranium Supply
Developments," a paper presented at the Atomic Industrial Forum
Fuel Cycle Conference, Phoenix, Arizona, March 22, 1976. More
recently ERDA has estimated an "attainable" U.S. production
capacity of 47,000 tons of yellow cake at the $15 cost level by 1985
and 60,000 tons by about 1990. According to Nucleonics Week,
September 23, 1976, ERDA summed up, "The information we
have today indicates that there is a good possibility that uranium
will be available at reasonable prices."

25. End 1976 estimates are taken from Nuclear News, "World
List of Nuclear Power Plants," August 1976, pp. 66-79.

26. See U.S. Congress, Joint Committee on Economics, Review
and Update of Cost-Benefit Analysis for the Liquid Metal Fast Breeder
Reactor, May 27, 1976, Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing
Office, 1976, p. 18.

27. Financial Times, London, December 9, 1975. American loss
estimates by R. Cornell of E. F. Hutton.

28. Chemical Engineering, January 6, 1975, p. 68.

29. Nucleonics Week, July 22, 1976, p. 8.

30. On ERDA's projections the plutonium then available from

337

light water reactor fuel will be over three times more than the
amount needed by breeders at the end of the century. Moreover,
even ERDA's low growth projections for the breeder presume an
unrealistically early and rapid build-up of commercial breeders.

338

The Buddha Smiles:
U.S. Peaceful Aid and the Indian Bomb (1978)

A Summary

Roberta Wohlstetteri

From Albert Wohlstetter, Victor Gilinsky, Robert Gillette
and Roberta Wohlstetter, eds., Nuclear Policies: Fuel
without the Bomb, Cambridge, MA: Ballinger Publishing
Co., 1978, pp. 57-72. Courtesy of the Wohlstetter Estate.
The unabridged version of this report is available from
www.albertwohlstetter.com/writings/BuddhaSmiles.

THE PATH TO THE INDIAN NUCLEAR EXPLOSION

The Indians decided in 1956 to produce and separate plu-
tonium long before they decided to make a nuclear explosive. So
did the British, and so did the French. The Indians had separated
plutonium in their Phoenix reprocessing plant by 1965, years
before they had any power reactors in operation, and the decision
to separate plutonium had no persuasive economic justification.
It was tied to plans in the 1950s for developing an Indian breeder
reactor that is still remote in the 1970s. However, India's plans to
produce plutonium, with only a tenuous and vague relation to a
realistic program of power production, were not very different
from the vague expectations of the United States and the United
Kingdom in the 1940s and the 1950s about the utility and even the
necessity of plutonium in the production of electric power.

Whether or not Indian plutonium ever became important
in the generation of electricity, the separated plutonium would
carry India most of the way toward a nuclear explosive. The same
would be true for any country acquiring substantial amounts of
separated plutonium. Neither our export policy nor that of any
other country had recognized this fact, or seriously tried to cope
with its consequences, until President Ford's Statement on Nuclear
Policy of October 28, 1976.

First Steps to a Bomb

It appears on the basis of public evidence that sometime in late
1964 Prime Minister Shastri had given Homi Bhabha, the director

339

of the Indian Atomic Energy Commission (lAEC), permission
to reduce the critical time needed to make a nuclear explosive.
Bhabha had stated some time before his death early in 1966 that
India could make a bomb in eighteen months, and by the spring of
1966 some Indians were claiming it could be done in six months.
Evidently Shastri's permission set in motion work on design of an
explosive system and preparation for testing of the nonnuclear
components. This preliminary activity would still leave open the
question as to whether India would assemble a nuclear explosive,
and also the question of whether, with the explosive at hand, India
would choose to detonate it. Shastri's private relaxation of his
public stance was motivated primarily by concern about China,
and the decision to go ahead with military components was given
greater impetus by the withdrawal of American military aid in
the fall of 1965.2

Shrinking Critical Time Versus Preserving the Option

India illustrates that, with cumulating changes that shrink the
critical time, only a minor event is needed to tip the decision in
the timing for exploding a nuclear device: for example, a mere
"tilt" toward Pakistan by the United States rather than a reversal
of alliance, or a need for a distraction from transient domestic
economic troubles such as a railroad strike. The basic decision to
come close to making a bomb has to do with more fundamental,
long-term interests.

One frequently talks of a given government trying to preserve
the option to become a military nuclear power. But the phrase
is misleading. A sovereign government cannot surrender such
an option in perpetuity, even if it renounces the possibility with
fewer qualifications than in the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT).
It can always change its mind and, starting from where it stands
in nuclear technology, proceed to get weapons. The Indian case,
however, illustrates the more important phenomenon, namely,
that a government can, without overtly proclaiming that it
is going to make bombs (and while it says and possibly even
means the opposite), undertake a succession of programs that
progressively reduce the amount of time needed to make nuclear
explosives, when and if it decides on that course. This can be done
consciously or unconsciously, with a fixed purpose of actually
exploding a device or deferring that decision until later. But it
is more than holding out the option. It involves steady progress
toward a nuclear explosive.

340

The Indian program also illustrates the linkage of decisions
among antagonists to get nuclear explosives, and also the fact that
the linkage is not a mechanical phenomenon but is related to a
network of competing national interests and domestic factions.
The Chinese nuclear explosion in October 1964 followed the Sino-
Indian conflict in 1962, which itself had been a flaring into the
open of the rivalry between the two Asian powers previously
smothered in the rhetoric of coexistence. The Chinese explosion
generated a policy debate among Indian domestic factions that
led more or less steadily to a nuclear explosion nearly ten years
later. The beginnings of the nuclear explosive program were
clearly visible for at least eight years. The Indian explosion in
turn, following Pakistan's disasters in the 1971 war, may confirm
Pakistan's decision to get nuclear explosives, "even if," as Prime
Minister Bhutto said, "we have to eat grass. "^ The consequences
of both the Chinese and Indian explosions involved not only such
direct links, but a more generalized lowering of the taboo.

The Rhetoric of Peace and Economic Development

The rhetorical separation, as if in a dichotomy, of peaceful
and military uses of nuclear energy, as well as the rhetorical
identification of investments in civilian nuclear energy with
economic development and catching up with the advanced
countries, form a substantial part of the background of cumulative
changes that made India's nuclear explosive program easier.

The identification of civilian nuclear energy with economic
progress is sometimes made in self-consciously symbolic terms
with no pretense at hard economic argument, but merely as
an invocation to modernity. Nuclear technology, it is said,
is the most important or most characteristic development of
the present age — the "nuclear age." Therefore it becomes the
essential component for catching up with the advanced countries,
from which India and other less developed countries have only
recently been liberated. Dr. Bhabha, the first director of India's
nuclear energy program, argued steadily in this vein against the
economic arguments of Francis Perrin, I. M. D. Little, and others.
He was aided by the rhetoric of Atoms for Peace, and his early
implementation of the Indian civilian nuclear program found
strong support in the U.S. Agency for International Development
(USAID) and the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (USAEC) of the
1950s as part of a general and generous U.S. policy to aid Third
World development.

341

The Rhetoric of Disarmament

The Indians also use the rhetoric of nuclear disarmament
and "general and comprehensive" disarmament as ultimately
justifying their production of nuclear bombs: (a) nuclear
armament would put them in a powerful position to argue for
nuclear disarmament (a standard argument by intending nuclear
powers), and (b) the only alternative to India's nuclear armament
is unattainable, namely, the disarmament of the superpowers
and of their own major antagonist China. Indian rhetoric here
exploits the insincerities and the hopes expressed in the rhetoric
of the weapons powers themselves. Off-the-record interviews at
crucial periods make plain, however, that Indian officials would
put no trust even in an agreement by China to disarm totally.
No such promise to disarm will substitute for an Indian nuclear
weapons program because, they say, there is no way of verifying
the nonexistence of Chinese bombs in the vastness of China's
territory.

This is the reality underlying India's part of the debate on
Article VI of the Nonproliferation Treaty.

In spite of the long gestation period, when the Indians were
plainly moving toward a nuclear explosive, U.S. experts both
inside and outside the government have tended to take Indian
arms control rhetoric at face value. One excellent student of
proliferation (Harold Feiveson) reported in 1973, shortly before
the explosion, on a consensus of U.S. experts that the Indians
would not explode a nuclear device.

National Sovereignty in the Less Developed Countries

Frequently in arms control negotiations we think of
countries like India as hostile to any surrender of sovereignty in
an alliance, but as quite willing to accept limitations by a truly
universal international authority. The Indians, as they prepared
their nuclear program, were sedulous attendees at Pugwash
conferences, as well as highly vocal participants in the Eighteen-
Nation Disarmament Committee. However, it is apparent that
India, like many other less developed countries, has been among
the most jealous of surrendering any part of its sovereignty to
an international inspectorate. It has fought against potential
harassment by IAEA inspectors and used some of the indirectness

342

of the trilateral relationship to keep as much freedom of action as
possible, and specifically freedom from restrictions imposed by
suppliers. Its agreement on nuclear cooperation with the United
States and the IAEA is unique in that safeguards apply only to the
enriched uranium fuel supplied by the United States and not to
equipment.

Ambiguities, Ambivalence, and Sanctions

The ambiguities of agreements on the Indian nuclear program
are central to the problem. Did the Indians violate any agreement
in literal terms? Even if they have not violated the exact terms of
an agreement, or even if they can argue that they did not, did their
actions represent a dangerous shrinking of critical time?

The U.S. government has made clear since 1966 that there
is no distinction between a peaceful and a military explosive.
But the Indians act as if the nonexclusive "and/or" were in fact
a dichotomous "either military or peaceful, but not both." This
poses problems for sanctions.

Precisely because Indian behavior did not overtly and
plainly violate the letter of agreements as the Indians chose to
construe them, the decision to impose sanctions was vulnerable
to arguments that the sanctions imposed costs not only on the In-
dians but on the United States as well. U.S. suppliers were heavily
involved, following the spirit of the original open-handed Atoms
for Peace program and later of Article IV of the Nonproliferation
Treaty, which promised "the fullest possible exchange" to help
civilian nuclear energy programs. (Even though Article IV was
directed especially at parties to the Nonproliferation Treaty, it
also stipulated "due consideration for the needs of the developing
areas of the world." And though the rights and duties under
Article IV are limited by the obligation in Article I, "not in any way
to assist non-nuclear weapons states to manufacture or otherwise
acquire . . . nuclear explosive devices," many nonnuclear weapons
states in this context conveniently forget Article I and the fact
that this is a nonproliferation treaty, not a nuclear development
treaty.) The machinery of grant aid and concessionary loans was
nowhere more utilized than in the Indian case. In its agreement
with India the United States also undertook various obligations
to send enriched uranium for reloads frequently enough to
keep the reactors operating, and to provide continuing technical
assistance. These are contingent, of course, upon India's fulfilling

343

its own obligations. However, if India does not do so, and if
the United States stops assistance, it does so at some domestic
cost to American business. At the very least American business
will be smaller than if we take a relaxed view of the customer's
obligation to eschew nuclear activities with a potential for military
application.

Besides American business, there might also be objections
from members of the relevant congressional committees and
the media, who would feel, after the so-called Pakistani tilt, that
the U.S. government was picking on India. Other factors also
reinforce the reluctance to impose sanctions: some members of
the U.S. bureaucracy think that the Indians were right; some were
involved in negotiating the original agreements with all their
ambiguities; and some, as always, find it pleasanter to distribute
rewards rather than punishments and dislike being cast in the role
of "heavy," perhaps especially with respect to a less developed
country that seems intermittently to be on the brink of famine,
and find the specter of responsibility for bringing on such a
famine hard to live with. For example, a breakdown in electric
power might decrease fertilizer production, which in turn might
affect the crops in Gujarat.

Although the United States had and continues to have
considerable leverage in the continuing Indian need for help from
General Electric when India runs into trouble with operating
the boiling-water reactors at Tarapur, and in the Indian need
for slightly enriched uranium, heavy water, and other supplies,
it is easy to understand why we have been reluctant to use the
leverage.

U.S. Ambivalence

There is in any case an ambivalence in U.S. policy. We have
been against proliferation in general, but not necessarily in
particular. Nonproliferation is only one of a number of foreign
policy goals, and those who stress it excessively tend to be regarded
as fanatics, "one-issue men." If in fact the occasions for application
of sanctions are blurred by ambiguity, and the effectiveness of
the sanctions themselves seems weakened because we no longer
hold a monopoly on the services we might threaten to withhold,
and because our influence over other suppliers is limited, policy is
likely to be affected by a feeling of the inevitability of the spread.
From there it is a short step to reviving the comforting doctrines.

344

popular especially in the late Fifties, that the spread would not be
so bad anyway. If we do not actually enjoy it, we might at least
relax.

Our own ambivalence and that of other supplier countries
and the implicit rivalries among them make for a failure to press
for very clear bilateral understanding as to what is proscribed.
Canadian and U.S. temporizing in the mid-1960s illustrates
this point. Unilateral understandings, no matter how explicitly
transmitted, are no substitute. Trudeau's plain talk to Indira
Gandhi is one example. Mrs. Gandhi was not talking — and not
listening either. Canada's recent decision to stop aid on the RAPP
II reactor has finally drawn a clear line between safe and dangerous
activities. Its actions clearly say that a nuclear explosive is not
exclusively peaceful.

The U.S. intelligence function is weakened by the fact that it
is not very clear about what should be looked for (a violation? a
legitimate activity that is "unsafe"?) and whether there is much
point in looking for it, for there may be no clear policy to do
something with the information and no urgent need expressed
in advance. May 18, 1974, marks a failure to clarify our policy on
response more than a failure of intelligence.

Nuclear Versus Conventional Forces

The Indian program proceeded slowly over a very extended
period under a nominal cover, but with many obvious indications
that India intended at least to explode a device and get a few
primitive weapons. Partly because of this manner of proceeding,
the Indians are a long way from having a serious nuclear capability
against their major adversary, China. Moreover, they suffer from
many geographical strategic asymmetries for this purpose. It is
conceivable that they may proceed with a missile program at
the same stately pace. On the other hand, they do have sizable
ambitions in the world strategic environment (the title of their
defense journal is India in ike World Strategic Environment). Though
extremely poor on a per capita basis, the country is large enough
to have a gross national product that can support a substantial
military program, and possibly in the future a much more
extensive military program than a simple last-resort capability
usable only in response to an overwhelming conventional attack
and with little hope of surviving nuclear attack. It might even go
for a blue-water navy.

345

The Indian conventional forces have been considerably
strengthened. The military in the mid-Sixties plainly regarded
nuclear weapons as a rival to such conventional expansion and
therefore did not support it. But as such conflicts frequently are
resolved, the military got its conventional expansion and the
Foreign Office and the Atomic Energy Department got their
nuclear explosives, with consequent increasing military support
for the nuclear program. An expanded military nuclear program
might in the future get wide general support.

Nonalignment and joint and Individual Guarantees

The Indians continued to maintain a nonaligned stance in
the mid-Sixties long after the conflict with China and regional
antagonisms had transformed the meaning of nonalignment.
Nonetheless, it made them reluctant to try to get an unequivocal
unilateral guarantee from the United States, which might appear
to line them up with the United States. They actively sought a
joint guarantee from the Soviet Union and the United Slates, even
though some high officials recognized that such guarantees among
potential adversaries are worth considerably less than alliance
guarantees. In the end the Nonproliferation Treaty was followed
by an extremely weak statement of guarantee by the weapons
states that they would take "appropriate action" according to the
decision of the U.N. Security Council. When the treaty was passed
in the Security Council, India as well as France abstained, though
it was the end point of a sequence of actions seeking a guarantee
in which India had played a leading role.

POLICY IMPLICATIONS OF THE INDIAN-CANADIAN-
U.S. EXPERIENCE IN NUCLEAR COOPERATION

This case history has implications (a) for decisions on future
U.S. cooperation with India itself and these are of course the policy
choices most directly illuminated; and (b) for the choice of policies
for stopping the spread of nuclear weapons to other countries as
well as India, and this more general application of the U.S. -Indian
experience is perhaps even more important.*

Some causal connection naturally exists between the policy we
adopt toward India in the future and the influence we can exercise
on other countries. Our policy toward India sends a message to
other countries that may be more persuasive than declaratory

346

statements about the rewards and penalties for actions that might
violate the letter or spirit of our antiproliferation policy. But even
apart from this direct effect of our Indian policy on our policies
elsewhere, it is apparent that the sequence of events leading
up to the Indian explosion in May 1974 had a widespread and
immediately recognized significance as a major challenge to
policies that had been directed at transferring nuclear technology
for peaceful uses only while discouraging or preventing its
military application. In the four years since the Indian explosion
international awareness of this challenge has deepened. It has
not, as some expected, dissipated. In fact, in spite of all that has
been written about the Indian nuclear program, the implications
of its history are not yet widely understood. Yet they are directly
relevant for much of the current debate on nuclear export policy.

Stopping Drifting Governments vs. Stopping Governments That Are
Committed from the Start

It is frequently argued today that there is no point in
constraining exports of plutonium separation plants or uranium
enrichment facilities or even in limiting exports of plutonium or
highly enriched uranium themselves. There is no point, and it
may even be bad, the argument runs, because almost any country
committed to getting nuclear weapons can get them by itself,
for example by designing and building a production reactor.^
After such a facility (say, a simplified version of the Brookhaven
Graphite Research Reactor taking four or five years to build
and using natural uranium) is fully operational, it will produce
plutonium in the spent fuel that might yield material for one or
two bombs a year.* Such a country could also design and build a
reprocessing facility for extracting plutonium from the irradiated
fuel rods.^ If we do not export facilities for producing such highly
concentrated fissile materials or the materials themselves to such
countries that are intent on getting nuclear weapons, we will
compel them, it is said, to do it on their own. It would be better
for the United States to supply these under safeguards.

This line of reasoning, which is sometimes buttressed by a
reference to the Indian example, has many weaknesses. In fact,
an examination of the Indian experience reveals a key flaw in
the argument. It is essential to consider not merely governments
that have made up their minds to get nuclear weapons and to get
them perhaps at any cost. That list is likely to be very small indeed

347

at the present time, as it has been in the past. More important is
the much larger list of governments that at any given time have
not made up their minds at all, or that have not even seriously
considered a nuclear weapons program, or that have considered
it and quite sincerely rejected it.

That larger list is the one that policy must principally address:
the countries that can drift toward a military capability without
any intention of arriving at it, and yet that may adopt a civilian
program that ultimately places them within days of acquiring
material for nuclear explosives. The Indian experience illuminates
that process of drifting toward a bomb. Canadian and U.S. help —
transfers of facilities, equipment and material, advisory scientific
and engineering services, training of Indian personnel, financial
subsidies and loans — formed a major ingredient of the Indian
program that was shortening critical time to make an explosive.
And this help was given before and after the Indians revealed
a strong interest in nuclear explosives. It continued after the
time when Indian officials were formally and informally issuing
statements that the Indian nuclear program had shortened the
time remaining before they could get an explosive, and while the
time announced was growing shorter and shorter.

During this period both the United States and Canada made
public announcements indicating that "exclusively peaceful
applications" excluded by definition explosives of any kind,
and the Canadians made many private reminders of this point.
However, in advance of the actual Indian explosion, neither
Canada nor the United States insisted that the Indians themselves
publicly agree with them, and still less did either government
demand that India eschew forms of nuclear research and nuclear
electric power activity that would provide them with stocks of
plutonium or simple compounds of it, and thus bring them closer
to a nuclear explosive. Nor did the United States or Canada ever
explicitly say that stocking plutonium was illegitimate.

Canada waited until after the explosion to insist on India's
disavowal of a nuclear explosive program, and it was only in 1976
that both governments indicated that civilian activities involving
stocks of plutonium might themselves have to be banned. The
latter course of action finally faces up to the question of stopping
a drift toward the bomb by countries not yet committed.

348

Current Pure Intentions Are Not Enough

A point closely related to the preceding one is also clearly
confirmed by the Indian experience: The fact that a government
receiving nuclear transfers has the purest of motives at the time
of receipt, that it intends to use this aid solely for purposes of
advancing civilian electric power, and that it abhors nuclear
weapons, offers no assurance that it will not change its mind, and
provides no warrant therefore for favored treatment in granting
aid which will shorten the time to make an explosive. Because
such aid makes it technically easier and cheaper to get nuclear
weapons and means that the progress toward nuclear weapons
can be more ambiguous, or concealed, and politically less risky, it
also facilitates a change in intention responding to new external
or internal pressures. Only a policy that restricts the forms of
nuclear energy (in research or in production of nuclear power) to
those that exclude national control of highly concentrated fissile
material can deal with future intentions to make nuclear weapons
and make it less likely that present good intentions will change.

This particular lesson is relevant today to the situation of
several countries (Japan, Sweden, West Germany) whose current
intentions are on all the evidence exemplary, but whose programs
of nuclear cooperation with us and other suppliers involve an
accumulation of plutonium and highly enriched uranium.

"Safeguards" are Necessary but Not Sufficient

Bilateral and international safeguard systems are essentially
arrangements for accounting and inspection. They are intended
to deter bomb manufacture by assuring early warning and
permitting timely counteraction.* The Indians resisted safeguards
with very substantial, though partial success. Some of their
facilities are not or will not be safeguarded at all, even though
they involve technology that is at least directly descended from
some Canadian and U.S. imports: for example, the heavy-water
reactors under construction at Madras. Other facilities given
them by Canada and materials given them by the United States,
though restricted to peaceful uses, were unsafeguarded: so
CIRUS and the U.S. heavy water used in it. Nonetheless even if
this unfortunate laxity had been avoided, safeguards would not
have been effective in fulfilling the purpose of providing timely
warning, if the Indians had been permitted to separate plutonium.

349

to fabricate it into mixed plutonium and uranium oxide fuel and
in the course of these activities, to stock significant quantities
of plutonium or simple compounds of it under their control for
use either in electric power or research. To prevent the sudden
manufacture of a nuclear explosive without warning requires not
only safeguards on essentially all research and power facilities
that could contribute substantially to the eventual accumulation
of fissile material, but restrictions on the accumulation itself.

The mixed plutonium and uranium oxide fuel requirements
implied by such extensive nuclear electric power programs as
those of Japan, Spain, and many other countries that do not have
nuclear weapons today are very large, and the plutonium or
simple compounds of it (such as mixed plutonium and oxide fuel)
are very quickly usable in an explosive. Any attempt therefore to
limit the working stocks of such plutonium under national control
to an amount that would be strategically insignificant is bound
to be unacceptable. Such restrictions would make these countries
much more dependent and their reactor operations much more
liable to interruption than they are presently or would be with
slightly enriched uranium fuel.

Fresh low enriched uranium stocks under national control
are more likely to be susceptible to limitations satisfying both the
user's desire for adequate working stocks and the international
community's desire to keep stocks of highly concentrated
fissionable material out of the hands of non-weapon states. It is
also true that international control and also close, even continuous
inspection of spent uranium fuel would intrude less into the
essential operation of reactors.

Policy Toward Countries That Make Nuclear Explosives in Spite of an
Agreement to Restrict Nuclear Activities to Peaceful Uses Only

The Indians used a facility given by Canada and some U.S.
heavy water to make and test a nuclear explosive. They did this
in both cases under a peaceful uses-only agreement, and the U.S.
State Department makes clear that our agreements had always
intended to exclude such a development.' Nonetheless we are
faced with the fact that, whatever our or their good intentions,
they have produced at least one nuclear explosive. What should
be our course of action?

On one side it can be argued that the damage is done. India
has carried through the program, and we might just as well, as

350

in the case of the French, acknowledge the fact and treat India
as a full-fledged member of the club, along with the preceding
five members. Or we might reduce our embarrassment somewhat
by accepting India's distinction between peaceful and military
explosives and, to preserve the fiction, provide them, so to speak,
with only an associate membership in the club. If we do not do so,
India can go ahead with its own program, having advanced so far,
and moreover, as a potential supplier of nuclear technology, India
could proceed to help other countries to follow in its footsteps
with a nuclear explosive program. There is no point simply in
punishing India, and encouraging it to be irresponsible.

On the other hand, such arguments, though tempting, have
disturbing implications for future aspirants to nuclear weapons.
For what it will suggest to them is that we will oppose their getting
nuclear weapons and even threaten dire consequences if they do,
but should they be successful in ignoring our opposition and our
threats, we will never execute the threats, and never impose any
sanctions, but only reward them with membership or associate
membership in the club. If in addition we permit civilian activities
that bring countries close to manufacture of nuclear explosives
in any case, then the interval of unpleasant opposition from us
before we reward them will be gratefully short. The truth is that
we oversimplify when we say that "the damage is done" as soon
as a country explodes a nuclear device. Much more damage will
be done if we do nothing to make the country regret its action.
This is especially true if there has been a violation of the sense of
an agreement. But even for those few countries that have never
disavowed an interest in nuclear bombs, we should make clear
in advance that in case they do, success will not be met by a
welcoming committee. It will cost them something.

Policy Towards Countries That Do Not Disavow Intentions to Make
Nuclear Explosives, "Peaceful" or Otherwise

There are about a half-dozen countries of importance that have
refused to ratify the NPT or to make a separate statement that they
will forgo even "peaceful" nuclear explosives (India, Pakistan,
Argentina, Brazil, Israel, Egypt). The Indian case illustrates the
dangers of continuing nuclear cooperation with such countries
and remaining content with unilateral statements to the effect
that such nuclear cooperation is premised on the recipient's not
making nuclear explosives at all or at least not making them with

351

the aid furnished in a specific U.S. nuclear agreement. I believe
that U.S. policy should refuse nuclear cooperation unless these
countries give up nuclear explosives altogether, and not just
nuclear explosives made using our help. This means no slightly
enriched uranium, no heavy water, no reactor sales, no advisory
services, no nuclear transfers of any sort.

A Policy for Both India and Pakistan

Indian military concern centered primarily on China rather
than Pakistan, and in fact as distinct from rhetoric, not at all
on a threat from the two superpowers. Indian arguments in
international forums about superpower disarmament were in
good part a way of justifying India's own armament and nuclear
explosive program. The Indians were interested in help from the
superpowers against China, and superpower disarmament was
rather irrelevant or inconsistent with that goal. Although they
have made constant reference to the evils of vertical proliferation
from the mid-Sixties on, the evidence suggests that this was
merely a debating point. It is, moreover, doubtful that substantial
superpower disarmament would in general influence a country
not to undertake a nuclear weapons program, if it is concerned
about nuclear threats from other sources.

The Indian experience confirms that countries that by choice
or circumstance stand outside alliance systems are particularly
liable to decide to make nuclear explosives, if it is easy for them
to do so and if the international environment changes adversely.
The Indians' cautious attempts to get nuclear guarantees jointly
or separately from the United States and the Soviet Union yielded
nothing very substantial, and U.S. conventional military assistance
was withdrawn just about the time that Indian concern about the
Chinese nuclear explosive program was most acute. A policy to
discourage nuclear proliferation has to deal with legitimate or
perceived military challenges, both direct and indirect, to the
countries concerned.

The new administration in India has begun with a rejection of
nuclear weapons and an expression of doubt about the usefulness
of "peaceful" nuclear explosives for India. Morarji Desai seems
likely to be skeptical of the sort of technocratic idyll that has
animated the nuclear energy program in India in general and
that in particular might give some shred of plausibility to such
dubious gadgetry as Plowshare.^" The nuclear bureaucracy in

352

India has been most closely linked with the Congress Party, with
Nehru and with Mrs. Gandhi. This is a particularly opportune
time, then, to induce a revision in Indian thinking and to move it
away from nuclear explosives.

However, there are obstacles other than the Indian nuclear
bureaucracy . First of all, our own nuclear industry and bureaucracy
fostered many of the Indian positions on nuclear energy and
rationalized them for the American Congress. A change in policy
in India presupposes a very clear-cut change in American policy
at the working level, as well as at the top. Second, India has some
legitimate defense concerns, and insofar as it has any continuing
worry about a Chinese nuclear threat, it may require some sort of
assurance of help. For the United States to provide this assurance
may be hard to manage. Third, India nonetheless has an interest in
seeing to it that Pakistan, an irredentist power with respect to parts
of India, and an adversary with whom India has been engaged
several times in the short history of Indian independence, does
not itself get nuclear weapons. There is no doubt that Pakistan
has been powerfully moved to get nuclear explosives by India's
own explosive program, and that Pakistan's desire to improve its
conventional forces is motivated mainly by its adversary relation
with India.

All of this suggests that it is essential to try to use a formal
abandonment of India's nuclear explosive program as a lever to
get a similar commitment from Pakistan about nuclear explosives,
and vice versa. And in a similar way, it is important to try to arrange
for the simultaneous abandonment by Pakistan of its plans for a
reprocessing plant and for the abandonment or indefinite deferral
by India of its plans to reprocess spent fuel.

We should assure India of nuclear material equivalent in
amount to that which it might derive from reprocessing spent
fuel. This equivalent would be in the form of natural or slightly
enriched uranium. We should also offer to take back India's
spent uranium fuel, and to lease rather than sell slightly enriched
uranium fuel rods in the future.

The plutonium content of the spent fuel has an uncertain value
that will depend on the relative costs of deriving fissile material
from spent fuel, compared to the costs of freshly mined uranium.
It may have a negative value. We should offer India, if it likes, an
equity interest in any use of its spent fuel to extract fissile material.
That is, if in the future it is profitable to extract plutonium from
spent fuel, we should give India a credit for the positive value

353

of the plutonium as an offset for the cost of the slightly enriched
uranium which we supply as a substitute. If this risky venture
of reprocessing is nevertheless undertaken and there are losses,
India, with an equity stake, would have a debit to add to the price
of slightly enriched uranium. India should not be obliged to take
the equity risk in reprocessing, but making it clear that India has
the opportunity will make it clear also that it is highly uncertain
that plutonium embodied in spent fuel has a positive value.

If India does not explicitly disavow a nuclear explosive
program, and if it does not accept full fuel-cycle safeguards, the
United States should stop nuclear cooperation with India.

If India does disavow nuclear explosives and accepts full
fuel-cycle safeguards, we should supply it with slightly enriched
uranium and heavy water only if it also agrees not to accumulate
plutonium or highly enriched uranium, and not to maintain
facilities that could quickly provide stockpiles of such highly
concentrated fissile material. A more restricted immediate policy
initiative would ask India to defer any further contracting into a
program yielding stocks of highly concentrated fissile material,
while we negotiate with it to provide equitable less dangerous
substitutes for the highly concentrated fissile material or the
facilities yielding it.

ENDNOTES - Roberta Wohlstetter - The Buddha Smiles

1. I want to thank Professor Albert Wohlstetter, as well as
several participants in the seminar where this paper was first
presented, in particular. Professor Robert Bacher of the California
Institute of Technology, Professor Leo Rose of the University
of California at Berkeley, and Professor Stanley Wolpert of the
University of California at Los Angeles.

2. For expansion and documentation of these points, see
Chapter 5, "From Civilian Power to Military Power," in The Buddha
Smiles: Absent-Minded Peaceful Aid and the Indian Bomb, Monograph
E-3, Los Angeles: Pan Heuristics, April 1977, available from www.
albertwohlstetter.com/writings/Buddha Smiles.

3. A statement by Bhutto in 1965 when he was Foreign Minister
quoted by Patrick Keatley, The Guardian (London), March 11,
1966.

354

4. I draw here on Albert Wohlstetter, The Spread of Nuclear
Bombs: Predictions, Premises, Policies, Monograph E-1, Los Angeles:
Pan Heuristics, November 1976, revised 1977.

5. See for example the views of Peter Hermes, State Secretary
of the Foreign Ministry, West Germany, and Hans-Hilger
Haunschild, State Secretary of the Research and Technology
Ministry, as summarized in Nucleonics Week, February 10, 1977, p.
9:

Bonn hopes that Washington will see the [Brazil-Ger-
man] deal in a different light after a more detailed study
of its safeguards, which as German government officials
are quick to emphasize, go beyond those of the non-pro-
liferation treaty. German philosophy is that a country re-
ally wanting the nuclear bomb will get it anyway. The Bonn
belief is that it is better to extend cooperation at a time
when it is still possible to persuade the recipient country
to accept international controls rather than turn down
the threshold country's request for technology, letting
it reach its nuclear goals through its own development
work, without IAEA inspections. As it is, "the [German-
supplied] Brazilian nuclear facilities will be fully subject
to IAEA controls."

See also C. Starr, W. Haefele, and E. Zebroski, draft paper on
"Nuclear Power and Weapons Proliferation," March 1976; E.
Zebroski, contribution to panel on "U.S. Nuclear Policy and
International Security," California Seminar on Arms Control and
Foreign Policy, December 7, 1976; and a 58-page Westinghouse
study cited by Nucleonics Week, March 31, 1977, as showing that
there are "multiple avenues" other than by way of LWR plutonium
that can be followed by a "determined non-nuclear weapons state"
(italics added).

6. John Lamarsh, "Construction of Plutonium-Producing
Reactors by Small and/ or Developing Nations," April 30, 1976,
reproduced by the Library of Congress, Congressional Research
Service, June 4, 1976.

7. John Lamarsh, "On the Extraction of Plutonium from

355

Reactor Fuel by Small and/ or Developing Nations," July 19, 1976,
reproduced by the Library of Congress, Congressional Research
Service, October 14, 1976.

8. Laws and Regulations Governing 'Nuclear Exports and Domestic
and International Nuclear Safeguards, Message from the President of
the United States, May 6, 1975, Washington, DC: U.S. Government
Printing Office, 1975, p. 35; General Alfred Starbird, Assistant
Administrator for National Security, Energy Research and
Development Agency, "Statement before the Senate Committee on
Government Operations," January 29, 1976, in Hearing on S-1439:
The Export Reorganization Act 1975, Washington, DC: U.S. GPO,
1976, p. 408; International Atomic Energy Agency, INFCIRC/153
(1971); B. Sanders and R. Rometsch, "Safeguards against Use of
Nuclear Materials for Weapons," Nuclear Engineering International,
September 1975, p. 683; and Chapter 3 of Albert Wohlstetter et al.
Moving Toward Life in a Nuclear Armed Crowd? report to the Arms
Control and Disarmament Agency, Los Angeles: Pan Heuristics,
April 1976, p. 72.

9. Robert J. McCloskey, U.S. Senate Committee on Government
Operations, Hearings on S-1439, p. 811.

10. Morarji Desai has been on record for some time against
nuclear weapons for India. He is quoted as saying, "We can drive
out any aggressor even without the bomb." He adds: "If China
were to throw an atomic bomb on the Indian border, she would
create an impenetrable barrier for herself." See Hari Ram Gupta,
India-Pakistan War 1965, Vol. 2, Delhi, India: Hariyana Prakashan,
p. 100.

In his first public press conference since his election as Prime
Minister he also expressed doubt as to whether a nuclear explosive
program would be useful for India and advised returning to
"cottage industry." See Morarji Desai, quoted by Newsweek, April
4, 1977, p. 36.

356

Signals, Noise and Article TV (1979)

Albert Wohlstetter, Gregory S. Jones, and Roberta Wohlstetter

Excerpted from "Why the Rules Have Needed Changing,"
in Towards a New Consensus on Nuclear Technology, Vol.
1, Summary Report Prepared for U.S. Arms Control and
Disarmament Agency, Los Angeles, CA: Pan Heuristics,
July 6, 1979, pp. 32-45. Courtesy of the Wohlstetter Estate
and Gregory S. Jones. The report from which this essay
is excerpted is available from www. albertwohlstetter.com/
writings/NewConsensus.

Military Signals and Civilian Noise

The problem presented by the spread to many countries
of civilian stocks of highly enriched uranium or plutonium, or
facilities that could quickly produce these materials, is that such
stocks would carry these countries so far along the path that leads
also to nuclear explosives that from the moment that their military
purpose became unambiguous, the additional time to get nuclear
explosives would be too short for any feasible inspection system
to provide timely warning. And timely warning, it has long been
recognized, is the most that a feasible international inspection
system can provide. The International Atomic Energy Agency
(IAEA) has no police force. Moreover, one of the major factors
affecting a government's decision to make a nuclear explosive
will be not only the extra time from the point at which its military
purpose becomes clear, but also the additional political risks and
indeed the increment in resource costs above the costs expended
for at least a plausibly pure civilian commercial activity.

The timely warning concept is not an innovation recently
thought up by President Ford near the end of his term in office.
It is an essential part of what is meant by "effective safeguards."
It was universally recognized as such in the 1940s when civilian
nuclear power first came to be talked about seriously. It was
intermittently forgotten in the 1950s but restored to a central
place in the 1960s, and in particular when the IAEA began to
elaborate its Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) safeguard
system in detail. Safeguards do not mandate any penalties but
only timely warning. That is what affords at least the possibility
of counteraction. Without even timely warning, we would have
little besides reminiscence.

357

What is new so far as the public (and even many public
officials) is concerned is the official acknowledgement^ in explicit
quantitative terms that power reactor plutonium is not safe but
can be used to make nuclear explosives reliably yielding 1 to 20
kilotons in even a very simple implosion device. The implication
immediately follows that the timely warning requirement
precludes the accumulation of stocks of separated plutonium or
simple compounds of it in non-weapon states. This should also
remind us that the same preclusion applies even more obviously
to highly enriched uranium.

Since the central aim of "effective safeguards" as explicitly
defined in the IAEA information circulars on NPT safeguards^ is
timely warning, signals of a military program must be detected
and identified early enough; but they must also be unambiguous
enough, that is, stand out clearly enough from the noisy back-
ground of civilian activity, to permit response either by interna-
tional agencies, by regional allies, or by regional adversaries who
have been relying on promises that the country observed will
not acquire nuclear weapons. Programs and facilities overtly
"dedicated" (to use the current jargon) to the purpose of getting
bomb material present of course the least ambiguous signals.
Some nuclear activities, facilities and equipment that are regarded
as having legitimately "civilian" applications may nonetheless
advance a country significantly toward a military weapons
capability. That is to say, they diminish the additional costs
entailed by a decision to get the bomb. They reduce the remaining
time it would take to get nuclear explosives, and they reduce also
the additional political risks of exposure and counteraction. For
usable warning time must be measured at best from the moment
that identification or differentiation from the noise is reliably made.
For some sorts of response, the signals have to be not merely
unambiguous enough, but they must also be public, i.e., usable
without excessive risk of destroying sources.

Confusions of " Peaceful Use" with "Exclusively Peaceful Use"

The rhetoric of Atoms for Peace has tended, for countries
aspiring to or undecided about whether to get nuclear weapons, to
enhance the political utility of the ambiguity inherent in nominally
civilian activities which in fact have a dual military and civilian
character. With the one explicit exception of Plowshare (nuclear
explosives for civil engineering). Article IV of the NPT is frequently

358

interpreted as conferring legitimacy on all civilian activities,
simply because they have some civilian function.^ This is so even
if they are not exclusively civilian in their import. As a result,
Article IV is often interpreted as obliging all advanced countries
to transfer any civilian technology except Plowshare, no matter
how far such transfer might carry the recipient country toward
a military nuclear capability. Even some Agreements on Nuclear
Cooperation between countries have been rather careless in failing
to include or to stress the adverb "exclusively." And the trouble
goes back to the beginning of the nuclear era, when we formed
the habit of talking as if a civilian use automatically substituted
for military utility, rather than sometimes complementing or
enhancing it.

However, the legislative history of the IAEA Statute shows
that "peaceful" was intended to mean "exclusively peaceful," as
well it might in the commonsense interpretation. In the United
States, for example, the legislative history makes clear that U.S.
Senators have always been concerned that a civilian use should
not also assist a country to get nuclear bombs. One illustration is
the exchange between Senator Sparkman and Secretary of State
Dulles in the 1957 Hearings on the IAEA. The Senator asked, "Just
what certainty is there that a particular peacetime project might
not have a future military use as well as a peaceful one?" Secretary
Dulles deferred to Atomic Energy Commission Chairman Strauss
but gave his

untutored impression that since the material furnished
will not itself be of weapon quality, and since the mak-
ing, converting of it into weapon quality or the extrac-
tion of weapons quality material out of it as a byproduct
would be an elaborate and difficult and expensive op-
eration, that could not occur without the knowledge of
the agency and that the violation would be detected.

According to the Secretary's impression, in short, the material
furnished, or derived from what was furnished, would be
"denatured."

Senator Sparkman's concern addressed the plain common
sense meaning of "Atoms for Peace" and of various Agreements on
Nuclear Cooperation. He assumed, but wanted to be assured, that
the material would have only a peaceful use. In the same way, in
reading the Nonproliferation Treaty, we ought to keep in mind

359

that the peaceful uses it wants to encourage are intended to be
exclusively peaceful, not also military.

Now Article IV of the NPT refers to the undertaking by all
parties to the Treaty "to facilitate" and the right of all parties
"to participate in the fullest possible exchange of equipment,
materials and scientific and technological information for the
peaceful uses of nuclear energy." Indeed, it refers to such rights
to the peaceful pursuit of nuclear energy, in the language of 18th-
century natural law, as "inalienable." The contention was made
by many of the delegates to the Iran Conference on Transfer of
Nuclear Technology at Persepolis in the spring of 1977 that this
"inalienable right" includes the stocking of plutonium or other
highly concentrated fissile material and was therefore violated by
President Carter's proposal to delay commitment to unrestricted
commerce in plutonium. This particular Third World rebellion
might have been a little more convincing if the President of
the American Nuclear Society had not played a leading role
in the writing of their declaration, and if some of the countries
complaining most bitterly about a supposed violation of a most
sacred part of the NPT had not themselves neglected ever to sign
or ratify the NPT.

However, Article IV explicitly states that the inalienable right
of all parties to the Treaty to the peaceful use of nuclear energy has
to be in conformity with Articles I and II, and it is these Articles
that are what make the Treaty a treaty against proliferation. In
Article I the nuclear weapons states promise not to transfer or "in
any way to assist, [or] encourage ... any non-nuclear weapons
state to manufacture" nuclear explosives. If the "fullest possible
exchange" were taken to include the provision of stocks of highly
concentrated fissile material within days or hours of being ready
for incorporation into an explosive, this would certainly "assist" an
aspiring nonnuclear weapons state in making such an explosive.
No reasonable interpretation of the Nonproliferation Treaty
would say that the Treaty intends, in exchange for an explicitly
revocable promise by countries without nuclear explosives not
to make or acquire them, to transfer to them material that is
within days or hours of being ready for incorporation in a bomb.
Some help and certainly the avoidance of arbitrary interference
in peaceful uses of nuclear energy are involved. However, the
main return for promising not to manufacture or receive nuclear
weapons is clearly a corresponding promise by some potential
adversaries, backed by a system to provide early warning if the

360

promises should be broken. The NPT is, after all, a treaty against
proliferation, not for nuclear development.

At the Windscale Inquiry in 1977, British Nuclear Fuels Limited
(BNFL) and the U.K. Department of Energy took the position that
England was obligated under Article IV to perform plutonium
separation services for non-weapon states.* And Mr. Justice
Parker, in his Report on the Inquiry, agreed with BNFL. He said
in fact that the NPT is "on its face a straightforward bargain"^: an
exchange of every assistance by the nuclear weapons states in the
development of nuclear energy for a promise by the nonnuclear
weapon states not to make or get nuclear weapons. This assumes,
among other things, that the non-weapon states have no interest
of their own in seeing that other nonnuclear weapon states do not
acquire nuclear weapons, that South Korea does not care if North
Korea has the bomb, that Syria is unconcerned about a nuclear
Iraq, that Iraq is not concerned about Iran, that Pakistan is not
worried about India, and that Belgium is not concerned about
the Federal Republic of Germany. This, of course, is an absurdity,
since it is not hard to find recent statements to the contrary in
almost all of these countries. Moreover, it flies in the face of the
actual history of the genesis of the NPT, which started as a rather
straightforward bargain, proposed by the Irish Republic, among
non-weapon states to increase their safety by mutual agreement to
abstain from getting nuclear weapons.* Article IV was one of the
embellishments added in the course of negotiation.

There are, of course, powerful commercial incentives for
suppliers who are engaged in selling nuclear services and various
nuclear materials and facilities to interpret Article IV as imposing
as little constraint as possible. In the short term at least, the "fullest
possible exchange of equipment, materials and services" is the
greatest encouragement to nuclear sales. The purchasers might
have mixed motives. Some, as President Carter himself suggested
on April 7, 1977, clearly have used or intend to use civilian facilities
to develop a nuclear explosive capability. Some, undoubtedly,
believe that civilian nuclear transfers will be of enormous
economic benefit or, perhaps, that they can stave off economic
disaster. They may be interested in the fullest possible exchange,
especially if Article IV can be interpreted as requiring nuclear
suppliers to subsidize these transfers. During the negotiation of
the treaty, in fact, Italy proposed inserting language to that effect,
but the motion was defeated.

361

The report of the Windscale Inquiry insisted that the nuclear
weapon states have the obligation, even if it might involve some
expense or loss/ By great good fortune it happens that Britain's
fulfillment of its obligation, as interpreted by Mr. Justice Parker,
is alleviated somewhat by the fact that the billion dollar contract it
has arranged with the Japanese involves a cost plus commitment
by the Japanese. The loss sustained then can only be negative.

Time, Warning Time and Article IV

The interpretation of Article IV is by no means a trivial
matter. If, in fact, technological transfers can bring a "non-nuclear
weapon state" within weeks, days or even hours of the ability to
use a nuclear explosive, in the operational sense that "non-nuclear
weapon state" will have nuclear weapons. The point is even more
fundamental than the fact that effective safeguards mean timely
warning. A necessary condition for having timely warning is that
there be a substantial elapsed time. But if there is no substantial
elapsed time before a government may use nuclear weapons, in
effect it has them.

Consider, for example, the situation of a government engaged
in a very short war with an adversary that has no nuclear weapons.
If its adversary appears to be winning, and [if] the government
has plutonium in explosive concentrations and the capability
of assembling an implosion system developed by years of
experiments with nonnuclear explosives in the rapid compression
of heavy metal, then from the standpoint of the adversary who
had been winning, it would be facing a government which to all
practical effect had nuclear weapons.

Or, consider the case of a government which is not at war,
but is capable of quickly assembling a nuclear device to use or
threaten to use against another government without such a
capability. Once again, there is no practical difference between
the coercion it could use or the threat it could execute from what
a nuclear power might manage.

Or, one might even consider a case where both of two
adversaries were that close to potential assembly and use. The
instability might be at least that which we associate with some
possible confrontations between two vulnerable nuclear powers.

The point may be driven home if we recall that in 1947,
for example, the United States stored its plutonium weapons
in disassembled form. Moreover, since the design was quite

362

primitive and used much more inconvenient components than are
commercially available today, the process of putting the weapon
together took many hours. In fact, it took a longer time than would
be needed today by a well prepared government laboratory to
make highly concentrated fissile material ready for insertion in
a nonnuclear assembly for compressing it rapidly.* The United
States did have nuclear weapons in 1947. And if the rules are
relaxed enough, so can nonnuclear weapon states today.'

There have been a number of recent statements suggesting as
implausible "an overnight scenario" by which is meant apparently
a contingency in which a non-weapon state assembled a weapon
in less than a day or so.^" There is, of course, nothing magical or
even anything of critical importance in the interval of 24 hours.
For purposes of policy against the spread of nuclear weapons, it
would be bad enough if a prospective nuclear power were able
to get ready in a few days or a few weeks. In suggesting that it
would be a great failure in proliferation policy if the rules made
it legitimate for a non-weapon state to come within a day or so
of readiness to use nuclear weapons, we surely do not imply
that having months or years of warning would not be valuable.
Nonetheless, it is worth noting on the plausibility of the overnight
scenario that the United States assembled the very first nuclear
bomb for the Trinity test in 26 hours and this included time out to
get some sleep. ^^

At the Windscale Inquiry, representatives of BNFL suggested,
as an alternative to dependence on slightly enriched uranium,
that those governments (which BNFL said were moved by a
concern for "energy independence" and a desire to obtain the
conservation benefits of plutonium) be allowed to purchase
plutonium separation services, but that the plutonium be sent
out in the form of plutonium fuel rods, perhaps pre-irradiated or
made radioactive in some other way; and in any case, that such
fuel be placed under strict international storage and control and
released only according to international criteria. The report of the
Windscale Inquiry in paragraph 17.6 seems to accept this suggestion
as a partial alleviation of the fact, which it there recognizes, that
plutonium fuel would bring non-weapon states closer to nuclear
weapons.

But this proposal has several difficulties, including some that
involve an intolerable legal tangle in the interpretation of Article
IV and some that would involve difficulties intolerable to the
purchaser.

363

To illustrate the latter point, this proposal would make these
countries more rather than less dependent on outside sources for
an uninterrupted fuel supply, and their reactor operations would
be much more liable to shutdowns than with the slightly enriched
uranium fuel which it would be feasible and safe to supply. ^^
Presumably, BNFL's proposal would mean keeping strategic
quantities of plutonium out of the hands of governments that do
not have nuclear weapons. If such arrangements were practicable
at all, keeping the amount of plutonium under national control
to less than a bomb's worth or a few bombs' worth would allow
these countries almost no working stocks of MOX or separated
plutonium under their own control. With only one MOX reload
as a working stock for each reactor, and assuming they do not
fabricate their own MOX fuel, in the 1990s Japan and the Federal
Republic of Germany would each have more than 1,000 bombs'
worth of plutonium quickly accessible and even Spain would
have 650 bombs' worth.^^ (That is, on their plans up to recently. If
they fabricated their own MOX fuel they would have even more
plutonium, in forms still more directly usable in nuclear weapons.)
But less than one thousandth or one 650th of a country's annual
reload requirement could hardly be called a working stock.

The American experience with India offers strong evidence
that even supplies of slightly enriched uranium fuel that would
have been enough to guarantee operation of the Tarapur reactor
for over two years have been deemed by the Indian government
to be below emergency levels, dictating resupply by air and other
speedy action.^* Moreover, the debate in the 1950s on the draft of
the IAEA Statute focused on similar though less drastic proposals
for deposit of fissionable materials with the IAEA. Even then it was
made clear that to give such powers to the IAEA was unacceptable
to governments like India, as threatening their economic life and
their independence . ^^ It seems extremely unlikely that governments
trying to secure a little more energy independence by the use of
plutonium fuel than if they only used natural or slightly enriched
uranium would accept a new international institution depriving
them of any significant national control of such plutonium, thus
making them more rather than less dependent on outside powers
for continuity of supply.

364

fissionable material out of the hands of non-weapon states. It is
also true that international control and close, even continuous,
inspection of spent uranium fuel would intrude much less into
the essential operation of power or research reactors, yet serve an
important function in providing early warning of diversion.

The proposal also makes a chaos out of the interpretation of
Article IV proposed by BNFL and Justice Parker (and most of the
vocal attendees at the Persepolis Conference). That interpretation
of Article IV, it will be recalled, had it that "every assistance" —
that is, any transfer whatsoever except for an actual weapon — was
required by Article IV. Even though the first paragraph of Article
IV states that the use of nuclear energy it contemplates must be "in
conformity with Articles I and II of this Treaty," which prohibits
transfers that would "in any way . . . assist . . . non-nuclear weapon
states to manufacture or otherwise acquire nuclear weapons,"
Justice Parker's report says that this does not exclude the transfer
of the service of separating plutonium. Mr. Parker says quite
correctly that at the time of the signing of the Treaty, many of
the parties to the Treaty believed that the development of nuclear
energy contemplated under Article IV included the production
of plutonium. In fact, it is not hard to find documentation for
that statement, including statements specifically mentioning the
transfer of metallic plutonium. The fact that the parties to the
Treaty did not understand that power reactor plutonium was
not and could not be "denatured," explains how they could have
accepted both Article IV and Articles I and II, to which Article IV is
subject. However, it is also obvious that many parties to the Treaty
believed that they would not be subject to any of the constraints
involved in the technical "fixes" BNFL and the report propose.
Surely no government expected to receive fuel in pre-irradiated
form and many, if not most, expected to fabricate plutonium
fuel themselves, and to be handling metallic plutonium. The
government of Canada, for example, a non-weapon state which is
a party to the Treaty, fabricated plutonium fuel in the early 1960s
for use in its NRX research reactor. To insist that governments be
deprived of plutonium except in the form of already fabricated
fuel rods, would be to deny them "every assistance."

The only way out of this dilemma is to recognize that "a
non-proliferation treaty should not contain any provisions
which would defeat its major purpose."^* That statement was
made during the hearings on the NPT before the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee by the U.S. spokesman who apparently

365

himself did not understand that power reactor plutonium metal
was directly usable in the bomb, and had mentioned it as one of
the things he thought was consistent with Article IV.

The operational meaning of Article IV is not an academic
matter. If suppliers could legitimately make any nuclear transfer
other than that of a fully assembled weapon, then this would
radically transform the situation both of warning signals and
of the sanctions they might evoke. For there to be a signal of a
violation, the activity signaled has to be illegitimate. But if Article
IV is not subject to the constraints of Articles I and II, in effect
there may be no violations.

As for sanctions, the implications here are worth stressing.

Sanctions and Article IV^^

Ambiguities as to whether an activity is "safe" and civilian,
or "dangerous" in its military implications, not only confuse
and reduce warning. They weaken and can totally frustrate
sanctions.^*

For a dozen years now, U.S. spokesmen have indicated that
our agreements on the peaceful use of nuclear energy have always
implicitly excluded the manufacture of nuclear explosives.^' The
Canadian government has said the same. When the Indians
conducted a nuclear explosion, they described it as "peaceful,"
and not a violation of any agreement either with Canada or with
the United States. The Canadian government, adhering to the
commonsense meaning of its agreements on nuclear cooperation
with India, took immediate steps to administer sanctions. They
stopped essentially all nuclear cooperation not only under the
agreement covering the CIRUS research reactor, but also on those
covering the CANDU power reactors at Rajasthan. The United
States, on the other hand, did not follow suit. It continued its
nuclear cooperation with India, and indeed in 1976 Hearings
before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Department of
State held that if the United States did not continue its shipments
of slightly enriched uranium to India under its Agreement on
Cooperation covering the Tarapur reactors, the United States would
be in violation; and that this would free the government of India
to do whatever it wanted to, not only with the future plutonium it
might accumulate from that reactor, but also with the plutonium
it had accumulated in the past.^" The present as well as the past
Indian administration has indicated it takes a similar position.

366

In fact, a casual survey of the debates in Parliament and the
Indian press revealed the prevalence of the view in India that
the United States is or would be in violation, but failed to turn
up any suggestion that the Indian government had violated the
agreement on CIRUS in making and testing its nuclear explosive.
Of course, most of our agreements now explicitly exclude the
manufacture and testing of a completed nuclear explosive. The
point of this example, however, is more general. If an activity that
brings a country very close to a nuclear weapon, and that stops
just short of its assembly, is legitimate, then by assumption, there
is nothing wrong with it. The government of that country has not
violated the agreement. Moreover, it is the application of sanctions
by the supplier that would be a violation of the agreement.

Increase of Civilian Nuclear Noise through Laxity in Project
Economics

The practice of promoting and undertaking civilian nuclear
activities which may confer prestige but have no strict economic
justification has increased the noise background which serves
as a potential cover for military activities. The IAEA has as
part of its charter the mission of accelerating and enlarging the
benefits of civilian uses of nuclear energy, with special regard
for the developing countries. It is worth observing, however,
that the principal international agency charged with financing
international economic development, namely, the International
Bank for Reconstruction and Development, has refused to
finance nuclear projects in the less developed world (and not
only the most dubious projects like small reprocessing plants
or the cumulation of fissile stocks likely to be idle for decades)
because it wants to support economic development rather than
status or prestige. Nuclear electric power is in general highly
capital intensive, efficient only in very large sizes and requires
continuing highly sophisticated maintenance, characteristics
which do not in general fit the needs of less-developed countries.
Expenditures for using plutonium fuel in breeders are in general
even more inappropriate. However dubious the civilian value of
some nuclear projects, their military applicability may be quite
definite. The most familiar example is Plowshare, which has yet to
demonstrate a realistic economic application, but which — because
of the laxity of economic analysis applied to such projects — has
served as a nominally civilian cover for an activity with obvious

367

military implications. In this case, the lack of rigor in the economic
analysis, indeed the nearly total absence of any economic analysis
at all, has reinforced the error involved in ignoring the point that
"Atoms for Peace" means "exclusively for peace." These particular
atoms for "peace" are in fact likely to be useful exclusively for
war. Article IV of the NPT therefore excludes "peaceful" nuclear
explosives.

Plowshare, however, is merely the most familiar case. The
careless way in which nuclear establishments in the mid-1950s
and at the beginning of the 1960s decided to separate plutonium
and to accumulate it for the distant and uncertain date at which
it might be used for the initial load of a breeder reactor, ignored
any rigorous economic criterion for investments over time. A
rigorous criterion would maximize the productive use of current
resources and so increase the resources available for future
generations. When India decided in the mid-1950s to invest in a
separation facility and in stocks of plutonium which in essence
would be economically idle for many decades — until the hoped-
for appearance of a thorium breeder, or near-breeder — this
was a waste of capital in a developing country where capital is
particularly scarce. Yet the activity served to increase the noise
level and the opportunities and ease for a decision to make
military nuclear explosives when circumstances changed.

Take the example of India: It has frequently been said that
there is very little connection between programs for nuclear
electricity and the spread of nuclear weapons to more countries.
And the prime example of this lack of connection is sometimes
said to be the Indian bomb program, which used plutonium from
their CIRUS research reactor. On the contrary, the Indian program
illustrates the connection. The CIRUS reactor was intended from
the beginning to produce plutonium as well as to offer facilities
for research and training. Both the plutonium and the research
and training were connected with nuclear electric power plans.
The research and training were, as one might expect, connected
indirectly. For a large-scale power program, men needed to be
trained in operating reactors, in handling radioactive materials,
in fabrication of fuel, in safety measures, and in understanding
the physics and engineering of related nuclear processes. CIRUS
was an important part of that. Moreover, the Indians intended
to develop their own natural uranium burner reactors on the
Canadian model, moderated by heavy water, and studies and
experiments with CIRUS were part of the program of designing

368

such power reactors. Finally, the plutonium was intended from
the start to be separated and stocked for use in near -breeder and
breeder power reactors. ^^ In short, the CIRUS reactor and the
Phoenix separation plant were, from the beginning, part and
parcel of an ambitious nuclear electric power program.

These long range plans paralleled in a general way (with some
modifications for exploitation of specifically Indian resources
of thorium) the model of nuclear power development current
in the industrial countries: to begin with burner reactors, and
to make a transition to breeders, using the plutonium from the
burner reactors for the initial fuel loading of the breeders. The fact
that such production and separation of plutonium followed the
general model of Canada and the U.S. itself in this respect gave
the Indian plans an apparent legitimacy. It made less likely that
anyone would question whether the plutonium would be used
in an explosive. Later, after the Sino-Indian war and the Chinese
bomb test (and after nuclear explosives for civil engineering had
been presented by the U.S. as a plausible agenda item at the Second
International Conference on Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy), the
Indians contemplated the use of the plutonium from CIRUS under
the alternative, apparently legitimate rubric of "Plowshare." (By
as early as 1966 Canada and the U.S., in response to rumors of
Indian interest in "peaceful" nuclear explosives, said in public
that any nuclear explosive had a clear military use.)

In the case of Plowshare, the cover of legitimacy was too
transparent to escape international notice and eventually a
sizeable international response. The Indian explosion provoked a
more immediate response, particularly by Canada. However, the
apparent legitimacy of the initial plans for the use of plutonium
from the CIRUS reactor for a future breeder served very well in
bringing the Indians to a position where they required very little
additional effort to shift to "peaceful" nuclear explosives from
plutonium stocked for breeder power reactors. The fact that such
plutonium stocks were justified by a quite unrealistic economic
and technical program for an early breeder did not distinguish it
sufficiently from India's other nuclear programs with a civilian
purpose; and the universality of similar long-range programs in
other countries helped explain why it was never noted that such
programs were not exclusively civilian in the technologies they
made accessible.

Finally, such neglect of the military potential implicit in these
civilian programs is made easier by the fact that the transfers

369

involved are small ones, shipments of heavy water and the
like, and training in reprocessing for small numbers of nuclear
engineers. These can be handled at middle or even lower levels
of the bureaucracy, where high policy is rarely in mind. When the
transfers come up for approval at higher levels, their small scale
is reassuring to the policymaker. Surely they do not constitute a
mortal danger. In fact, they seem like a reasonable item or trinket
for barter for the good will of a friendly country, and the good
will of one's counterpart in the bureaucracy or political hierarchy
of that country.

But it is precisely in this way that the policy on spreading
civilian nuclear energy as a substitute for military nuclear energy
dissolved into incoherence and the furtherance of military nuclear
activity during the late 1950s. And it is always in danger of
dissolving.

Plowshare has for a long time been a rather transparent
cover for a military purpose. However, it seems that decisions
to stock separated plutonium for the breeder began as sincerely
but badly conceived economic measures. Many other countries
besides India, including Japan, decided very early to accumulate
plutonium, not for recycle in light water reactors, but for the
breeder. These early decisions were made with little economic
analysis, on the basis of quite unrealistic anticipations of the
dates at which breeders might be of commercial importance. In
India, however, these early decisions made on other than military
grounds served to prepare for a program of nuclear explosives.
More recent decisions to acquire either stocks of plutonium
separated elsewhere, or a national separation plant, are likely
to be from the outset more self-consciously related to military
plans. For example, Pakistan, which has no reactors requiring
fuel enriched by either uranium or plutonium, sometimes insists
that the separation plant it is purchasing from France is purely
civilian in intent, and on the other hand sometimes says that she
will be glad to give up plutonium separation, provided that the
superpowers abandon their own nuclear weapons. ^^ Which rather
directly, if inconsistently, acknowledges that Pakistan's purpose
in separating plutonium is only to make nuclear weapons to
balance those of "Nuclear Powers" and that this purpose would
be served equally by the destruction of everybody else's nuclear
weapons.

370

ENDNOTES - Wohlstetter et al. - Signals, Noise
and Article IV

1. "Reactor Plutonium and Nuclear Explosives," briefingpaper
by Robert W. Selden reported by Robert Gillette as presented to
representatives of nuclear industry and foreign governments,
November 1976, Meeting of the American Nuclear Society and
Atomic Industrial Forum, Washington, DC. See Gillette, "Military
Potential Seen in Civilian Nuclear Plants," Los Angeles Times, June
26, 1977.

2. International Atomic Energy Agency, Information Circu-
lar/153, p. 28; and Safeguards Technical Manual, lAEA-174, 1976.

3. See Arthur Steiner, "Article IV and the 'Straightforward
Bargain'," PAN Paper 78-832-08, in Wohlstetter et al., Towards a
New Consensus on Nuclear Technology, Vol. 2: Supporting Papers,
ACDA Report No. PH-78-04-832-33, Marina del Rey, CA: Pan
Heuristics, July 6, 1979.

4. The BNFL view of Article IV reflects this interpretation
widely preferred by the nuclear industry and nuclear agencies of
other countries as well. See, for example, "U.S. Nuclear Export
Policy," statement by the Atomic Industrial Forum's Committee
on Nuclear Export Policy, July 21, 1976. It also appears to be the
view of the Director General of the IAEA.

5. Report by the Hon. Justice Parker, presented to the British
Secretary of State for the Environment, in The Windscale Inquiry,
Vol. 1, Report and Annexes 3-5, London: Her Majesty's Stationery
Office (HMSO), January 26, 1978.

6. See Steiner, "Article IV and the 'Straightforward Bargain'."

7. Windscale Inquiry, p. 18.

8. Albert Wohlstetter, "Spreading the Bomb without Quite
Breaking the Rules," and History of the Strategic Air Force,
typescript. Vol. 1, unclassified portion in Air Force history
archives.

371

9. On this point, see Albert Wohlstetter et al., Swords from
Plowshares, op. cit.

10. See, for example, Carl Walske, "Nuclear Power and
Proliferation," speech delivered to the International Conference on
Nuclear Power and the Public: A European-American Dialogue,
Geneva, Switzerland, September 27, 1977.

11. Arthur Steiner, "Trinity, the First Overnight Bomb," Pan
Heuristics Paper 78-832-09, February 1978.

12. Our comments here do not address the question as to what
extra costs would be imposed on the purchaser by the various
methods of making the fuel radioactive, nor the question as to
how effective such technical "fixes" might be.

13. Chap. 1, "The Military Potential of Civilian Nuclear
Energy," in Swords from Plowshares.

14. March 25 Order By the Nuclear Regulatory Commission
in the Matter of India, to Export Special Nuclear Material, Docket
XSNM 805, KSNM 845, Transcript, pp. 4ff.

15. Dr. Bhabha rejected the draft proposal which gave the
IAEA the power "to approve the means to be used for chemical
processing of irradiated materials recovered or produced as a by-
product, and to require that such special fissionable materials be
deposited with the Agency except for quantities authorized by
the Agency to be retained for specified nonmilitary use under
continuing Agency safeguards." (AEA/CS/OR/28, p. 6.) "In
our opinion," Dr. Bhabha continued, "the present draft gives
the Agency the power to interfere in the economic life of States
which come to it for aid. ... It therefore constitutes a threat to their
independence, which will be greater in proportion to the extent
that this atomic power generation is developed through Agency
aid" (IAEA/ CS/OR/7, pp. 49-50).

16. Hearings on the NPT before the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee, July 1968, p. 39.

372

17. See Arthur Steiner, "Safeguards, Sanctions and Signals,"
PAN Heuristics Paper 78-832-08, April 1978; and 'Article IV and
the 'Straightforward Bargain'," op. cit.

18. On this, see Wohlstetter et al., Swords from Plowshares, op.
cit.

19. See testimony of Robert J. McCloskey, U.S. Senate,
Committee on Government Operations on S.1439, June 16, 1976,
p. 811.

20. Acting Assistant Secretary, Bureau of Oceans and
International Environment and Scientific Affairs.

21. See Roberta Wohlstetter, Seminar on U.S. Peaceful Aid
and the Indian Bomb, Santa Monica, CA: Seminar on Arms
Control and Foreign Policy, December 1976, revised August 1977;
"The Buddha Smiles: Absent Minded Peaceful Aid and the Indian
Bomb," Monograph 3 in Can We Make 'Nuclear Power Compatible
with Limiting the Spread of Nuclear Weapons, op. cit.; and Swords from
Plowshares, op. cit.

22. See, for example. Dawn Overseas, Islamabad, June 19, 1977:
"Mr. Bhutto said Pakistan was ready to cancel its deal with France
if the Nuclear Powers gave a solemn pledge to destroy each and
every nuclear weapon."

373

Nuclear Triggers and Safety Catches,
the "FSU" and the "FSRs" (1992)

Albert Wohlstetter

Unpublished note, February 6, 1992, available from the
Hoover Institution Archives, Albert and Roberta Wohl-
stetter Papers, Notes, Box 121, Folder 1. Courtesy of the
Wohlstetter Estate.

February 6, 1992

The U.S. and other Western leaders have been celebrating the
breakup of the evil empire, the Former Soviet Union, or "FSU";
and the end of the Soviet nuclear threat to the West. But they
sometimes seem to be continuing to try nostalgically to keep the
old Empire — or most of it— together, under Moscow's control.
They seem even to be trying to preserve the General Staff and the
unified Soviet military responsible, if at all, to Moscow. Or if not,
to that quite insubstantial ghost of Empire, the Commonwealth
of Independent States (the CIS). Which is to say, responsible to
no one. The Soviet General Staff seems to be the only entity of the
FSU which doesn't need the qualifier "Former."

Aside from nostalgia, it is the fear that the disintegration of
the FSU might quicken the spread of nuclear and other weapons
of mass destruction that most often motivates Western efforts to
keep Moscow in charge. We should indeed worry about an increase
in the number of centers capable of deciding independently to
launch nuclear weapons. But our leaders' fears aren't that precise.
That's part of the trouble.

In its vague form, this fear was one of the main justifications
for their support of Gorbachev and Communist rule. They needed
same existing national entity that could sign nuclear arms control
agreements. Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Ukraine, et. al. weren't
national entities. Now that the former Soviet republics (the FSRs)
do exist, and we recognize them. Western leaders continue to
support Moscow. They have substituted Yeltsin (or possibly the
General Staff) for Gorbachev, and the Russian Republic for the
Soviet Union.

They have been pressing the non-Russian FSRs to transfer
all nuclear weapons to the Russian Republic. The FSRs such as
Ukraine plainly don't feel they need nuclear weapons to deter

374

an unprovoked nuclear attack by the United States. (That was
never a plausible fear in the Soviet Union itself.) Many of the
political leaders of the FSRs have indicated they want to be free of
nuclear weapons. However, several of the FSRs are uneasy about
allowing the Russian Republic, whose dominance they have only
just escaped, to be the only FSR which could make an unimpeded
decision to launch — or threaten to launch— nuclear weapons.
They see that as a threat to their continuing independence.

Ukraine, for example, has for decades been a site for the
development and manufacture of nuclear weapons, not to
mention chemical and biological weapons. Ukraine is likely to
want to maintain some of the facilities they have, or build similar
ones in the future. It seems the arrangements the U.S. government
has been pushing offer incentives for the spread of independent
decision centers for the production and use of weapons of mass
destruction. The Administration doesn't want Ukraine et al. to
have nuclear weapons, but apparently it does want Russia to have
them.

The Administration has made statements to the effect that it
wants to see Russia keep nuclear weapons, even if they're aimed
at us.

In December 1991, Secretary Baker wound up in Brussels at
the end of a long trip that took him to Moscow, Bishkek, Alma
Ata, Minsk and Kiev. He held a press conference where he was
asked,

Mr. Secretary, you said a minute ago that you were not
unambiguously in favor of Russia becoming a non-nu-
clear power because you said you weren't prepared to
walk away from the concept of deterrence. Can you be a
little more specific as to who the Russian nuclear weap-
ons are deterring?

Secretary Baker answered:

No, and I won't right now be any more specific with you
about whom our weapons are deterring. But over the
past forty years they have served as a substantial and
significant deterrent, and I would like to see zero weap-
ons targeted on the United States, but I'm not prepared
today here, having said that, to subscribe to the philoso-
phy of de-nuclearization. That's all I was saying.

375

How's that again? He and some of his advisors, like the Director
of Policy Planning, have been clearer. However, on the subject of
the spread of nuclear weapons in general, the fog at Foggy Bottom
has been dense for many years. And it's been pretty cloudy about
American interests in the disposition of the nuclear weapons,
materials and facilities that are now distributed in the territory of
several of the FSRs.

It may be that some members of our Foreign Service feel that
the Administration's reluctance to see the republics abandon
nuclear weapons is because America needs adversaries armed with
nuclear weapons in order to deter them from an attack on us. But
then it's hard to see why we can't fortify our deterrence by letting
other FSRs have the ability to launch weapons independently, so
we could deter them. It's hard to see, then, why we should worry
about Iran and Libya, or even Saddam. Poor Saddam, he's been
trying so hard to get a nuclear force which we could also deter!

Nuclear weapons are likely to spread further, without U.S.
encouragement, and to countries that might use them or threaten
to use them for purposes hostile to American interests. They'll be
forces to exercise U.S. capabilities for deterrence. On the whole,
it's a better idea to slow or to reduce their increase as much as
possible. But policy in this connection will be better if the U.S. is
clearer.

It's in the U.S. interest, of course, to see as many of the nuclear
weapons in the former Soviet Union disabled and destroyed as is
feasible. But that process will take a lot of time. Put that aside for
the moment and consider the control of those weapons that are
not scheduled for destruction.

We need to make at least one basic distinction: that between
"control" meaning the power to decide to launch a nuclear
weapon; and "control" meaning the power to veto a decision to
launch a nuclear weapon. There's a difference between a finger
on the trigger and a finger on the safety catch. The "trigger" or
the "safety catch," like the "button," of course is a metaphor. But
a useful one in this case.

When we say we want to "concentrate" "control" in order
to reduce the number of decisionmakers who control nuclear
weapons, we mean we want to have as few fingers as possible
on the "trigger." (Or: When one talks of reducing the number of
people in "control" of nuclear weapons, it's the number of fingers
on the trigger that' s contemplated.) We mean we want to minimize

376

the number of those who can, without interference or veto, launch
any of the nuclear weapons in the territory of the FSU. From the
standpoint of the prospective targets, maximum safety would be
achieved when the number of fingers on the trigger is zero.

As for fingers on the "safety catch," the more the merrier.

The United States had many weapons overseas under multi-
key arrangements. From the standpoint of the United States, it
seemed important that such weapons couldn't be used without
a U.S. representative turning a key or inserting one essential part
of the combination. Host countries, on the other hand, in general
didn't want weapons launched from their territory without
consent. They didn't want the weapons launched unless they
had turned their key or inserted their part of the combination.
Such arrangements can be made so that the weapons are not
usable (without the efforts of a national laboratory) unless all
combinations are inserted from remote sources.

Neither Russia nor the non-Russian republics are worried
about an American or French or British threat. They may worry
about threats from each other that might come up in the course of
the painful process of the division of assets, populations, etc., in
which differences might be settled or strongly influenced by the
potential use of weapons of mass destruction.

From the American standpoint, but also from the standpoint
of the FSRs, the best way to avoid those problems is to distribute
vetoes over decisions to use nuclear weapons, wherever they are,
rather than to distribute nuclear weapons or see their spread as
counters to each other.

377

IV. ARMS RACE MYTHS VS.
STRATEGIC COMPETITION'S REALITY

379

Commentary: Arms Race Myths vs.
Strategic Competition's Reality

Richard Perle

"All this is familiar, but is it true?" was Albert Wohlstetter's
response to widely accepted ideas about the U.S. -Soviet arms
race in 1976, ideas he proceeded to demolish — but only after
adumbrating them with a precision that eluded the officials,
academics, and intellectuals who held them.

Racing Forward? Or Ambling Back? (1976) was vintage Wohl-
stetter: precise, masterfully argued with clarity, logic, masses
of evidence, wry humor, and great elegance. Albert puts the
arguments he knocks down far better than their adherents,
sharpening the vague notions that formed the core of thinking
about arms control into well-defined propositions that could be
tested against the evidence, the facts and logic on which they
were based.

Of course, he had been doing this for years, examining
complex issues by breaking them down into their components,
testing those components, gathering all the available relevant
facts (and doing basic, original research to establish facts that
were not readily available), reading everything connected to the
subject, and rendering the whole into a rich, original, and rigorous
analysis.

In an unpublished note, Albert points to the importance of
philosopher Karl Popper's insistence that meaningful statements
must be open to disconfirmation. As Albert put it: "If a statement
cannot conceivably be refuted by any observation or test, it has
no meaning. Such statements are impregnable but empty."^
He regarded the vague provisions commonly found in arms
control agreements as dangerously empty because they were
too imprecise to be tested. From this observation he concluded —
and subsequent history proved him right — that it would be
extraordinarily difficult to reach clear and convincing conclusions
about arms control violations, even when they occurred.

While Albert's focus was principally on the nuclear arms
control agreements of the 1970s and 1980s, the pitfalls of vaguely
worded agreements — an inability to verify and therefore to force

381

compliance — are as relevant to deals with Iran or North Korea
today as they were for deals with the Soviets during the Cold
War.

Albert was at his best when the conventional thinking he
challenged was most widely accepted: the greater the number
of proponents, especially if they were widely read and admired,
the more pleasure Albert took in the rigorous examination, and
frequent refutation, of their views. And when he could group a
gaggle of respected commentators into a chorus singing from the
same flawed sheet of music, he did so with good-natured glee. That
is why in Racing Forward? Or Ambling Back? he quoted so many
"experts" saying the same thing. After all, two or three quotations
from Morton Halperin or Jeremy Stone would have sufficed to
demonstrate that conventional thinking about the "arms race"
held it to be the product of over-estimation and reciprocal over-
reaction. He hardly needed to add statements to the same effect
from Jerome Wiesner, Leonard Rodberg, Herbert Scoville, Leslie
Gelb, Robert McNamara, Stanley Hoffman, and Paul Warnke. But
these were the authorities in the arms control field, and Albert was
determined to corral them all before leading them to slaughter.

For Albert, the field of" arms control" was almost wholly lacking
in intellectual content. The popular press, drawing its information
from conventionally thinking "experts," had largely succeeded in
establishing the "fact" of a U.S.-Soviet arms race in the minds of
policymakers as well as the broad public. Albert understood that
the arms race theorists' underlying misconception would make it
difficult to gain support for policies that could enhance American
safety and security. So while he enjoyed demonstrating that there
was in fact no such thing as a spiraling "arms race," he regarded
the belief that there was as deadly serious. If a mistaken belief
in a mythical mechanism called the "arms race" meant that the
United States might not make prudent investments in secure and
discriminate strategic forces, or might turn to fragile agreements
rather than measures of self-defense, well, he would have to begin
at the beginning and put the concept of the "arms race" under the
microscope.

And what a sharp, rigorous element his microscope had.
Take, for example, Albert's treatment of the issue of over or under
prediction of Soviet nuclear forces. Contrary to the widely held
belief that we had chronically under-estimated the future size of
Soviet arsenals, Albert's meticulous audit shows the opposite.
Having won the point, he goes on to tease out and dissect yet

382

another error — the mistaken belief among those who grudgingly
acknowledged a history of under-estimations — that estimates got
better with time and experience. This apparent but wrong finding
was the product of a flawed methodology, which he takes pains
to explain:

Some analysts now grant that we underestimated, but
claim that we improved with time. They ignore the im-
portant difference between predicting a cumulative total
of vehicles that will have been deployed at some future
time, most of which are known to be already completed
or in process at the time when the prediction is made,
and predicting a change from this known state. This ac-
curately-known past makes up an increasing portion of
the cumulative total. Nonetheless, those who detect an
improvement in forecasts compare predicted with ac-
tual totals, not predicted with actual change from what
was known; and so swamp unpredicted new starts in
the steadily increasing total of launchers known to be
started or completed.

Albert was intrigued by the pattern of under-estimation he so
carefully documented and searched for an explanation. When he
found it, he put it succinctly:

Part of the pressure to conform by underestimating was
very likely a reflex, over-correcting for the "missile gap"
that had publicly embarrassed the intelligence commu-
nity.

Re-reading that, I could not help thinking of the December 2007
National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran's nuclear weapons
program. Could the intelligence community be over-correcting
for the infamous 2003 Iraq NIE that caused the nation and the
world such grief? And if Albert were alive and serving on the
President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, as he once did,
would the CIA and the other intelligence agencies have gotten
away with the Iraq estimate in the first place? Or the Iran estimate
now?

As a member of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board, I sat
through a number of intelligence briefings following the attacks
of September 11, 2001. Some of them had to do with Iraq and

383

its weapons of mass destruction. Now, with the advantage of
hindsight, I can see how imprecision about what we actually
knew — as opposed to what we believed could be reliably inferred —
led to the mistaken conclusion that Iraq had a stockpile of weapons
of mass destruction. The careless acceptance in the Iraq NIE of
information that required establishing the reliability of informants
was not inevitable. But the now famous case in which an Iraqi
defector in Germany was never interviewed by U.S. intelligence,
leaving his false claims simply taken at face value, would have
astonished even Albert, who was a frequent critic of intelligence
estimates. Albert served on the Defense Policy Board for many
years, but not as the nation contemplated its response to 9/11.

We will never know whether his relentless questioning
of everything and everyone would have teased out the hidden
assumptions and flawed inferences in the Iraq NIE. (Or, for
that matter, whether he would have seen the possession of
stockpiles of WMD as the central issue. He was, as so much of
his writing makes clear, always mindful of how rapidly things
can change and how quickly civilian programs — to say nothing
of unilaterally abandoned military ones — can be activated for
military purposes.)

Neither will we enjoy the benefit of Albert's critique of the
Iran NIE. I imagine it would zero in on the apparent inconsistency
of Iran's sustained, costly, and challenging ballistic missile
development with the regime's claim not to have a nuclear
weapons program. I know he would be wary in the extreme of
the idea that the way to deal with a future Iranian nuclear weapon
is to sign an agreement in which the regime in Teheran promises
to restrict itself to only "peaceful" uses of nuclear materials.

If we were to think as Albert would about the issues flowing
from Iran's current position with respect to nuclear power (they
insist on it) and nuclear weapons ("we don't want and have no
program to get them"), we would do well to study his important
discussion of the multiple applications of a single technology or
the multiple technologies instrumental in the achievement of a
single purpose. Albert believed that both phenomena rendered
arms control dangerously ineffective in all but a few very special
cases.

In the case of the Iran NIE, and in other intelligence products
not yet even conceived, we should resolve to apply the Wohlstetter
four-word test: "But is it true?"

384

Albert's disdain for arms control theory reflected his concern
that ineffective agreements would substitute for hard thinking
and hard choices about how to protect the nation in the era of the
"delicate balance of terror." That was the title he gave to a brilliant,
widely discussed article in Foreign Affairs in 1959 that introduced
the broad public to the key concepts of strategy in the nuclear
age, many of which were conceived and articulated during the
course of his highly classified research at the RAND Corporation.
He was especially emphatic in later years that careless thinking
about arms control could drive strategic policy even further in
the direction of accepting "mutual assured destruction" (MAD)
as the key to American security.

Much of Albert's critique of arms control refers to what he
calls "MAD-based arms control" because its main objectives were
premised on the idea that (a) stable nuclear deterrence was easy
to achieve; (b) the way to achieve it was to build only a minimum
deterrent force that could confidently destroy Soviet (or, for the
Soviets, American) cities in a massive retaliatory attack; and
(c) since both the United States and the Soviet Union accepted
(a) and (b), agreements in which each pledged not to acquire
capabilities beyond those defined in (b) could, and should, be
negotiated. But when one examined the arguments for the arms
control agreements beginning with the (subsequently violated)
moratorium on nuclear testing and continuing through the
ABM Treaty and the SALT and START treaties, they invariably
presupposed the desirability of a strategic balance based on the
threat to destroy cities.

So, at the core of Albert's disparagement of arms control is his
view that the underlying rationale for treaties limiting the numbers,
types, and technologies of strategic forces served only to reinforce
MAD doctrine, a doctrine he deplored on both prudential and
moral grounds. After all, the idea that it was desirable to reduce
our strategic arsenal to the lowest number of weapons required
for massive retaliatory attacks against Soviet cities meant that if
deterrence failed, we might someday be forced to choose between
doing nothing or killing millions of innocent civilians. Throughout
his life and writings, Albert argued the moral obtuseness of the
physicists, clergymen, politicians, and intellectuals who so readily
embraced MAD. (Once, observing a group of women marching in
an antimissile defense demonstration in Washington, DC, Albert
remarked: "They must call themselves 'mothers for offensive
forces only'.")

385

Responding to Henry Kissinger's rhetorical question, "What
in God's name is superiority at these levels?", Albert comments:

I am all for probing the premises of thought on arms and
arms-control which the Secretary is said to want. But
that can only start when we face up to evasions making
"murder respectable" in such chaste phrases as "coun-
ter-value attacks" and in all the unreflective vocabulary
of the arms race. This is an important part of rethink-
ing policy about our relations with allies and adversar-
ies, long overdue and essential for reducing the present
chaos.

Albert's deep skepticism about the utility of arms control
agreements did not lead him to oppose them in principle,
although he was frequently described as among a group of
analysts who were "opposed to arms control." While many of the
arms control enthusiasts Albert assessed never met an agreement
they didn't like, it could not be said that Albert opposed all
agreements. To be sure, he set a much higher standard than the
arms control professionals — negotiators, analysts, politicians,
and professors — by insisting that only certain types of agreement
were worth having. The criteria he set out are as relevant today
as when he argued for them over a long career — and they tend to
be ignored by diplomatic professionals who frequently lose sight
of an agreement's purpose in their zeal to get an agreement for
agreement's sake.

The idea that arms control agreements should have limited
purposes and should be of limited duration reflected Albert's
view that "comprehensive" agreements were bound to invite
evasion through the exploitation of loopholes or, worse, out-and-
out violations. He opposed permanent agreements because he
knew that the considerations underlying any agreement would
change in unpredictable ways: today's technological cul de sac
would become tomorrow's super highway.

He knew that, once in place, arms control agreements were
nearly impossible to vacate, even if they had clear termination
clauses (indeed, even when they had expiration dates). And
he knew that agreements were not self-enforcing. He scoffed
at the claims of arms controllers that "if the other side violates
the agreement, we will withdraw from it immediately." He had
seen too many instances in which it was difficult or impossible to

386

prove that a violation of a vaguely worded provision had taken
place, or in which a questionable interest in keeping a violated
agreement trumped even a legal exit, or in which the hope that yet
another agreement could be reached led governments to turn a
blind eye to the violations of the agreements already in place. He
summarized his view of an agreement worth having this way:

For this reason, one should reject the argument made by
many proponents of arms control today that a treaty of
permanent duration will confer stability, because it will
enable us and our adversaries to plan with certainty. On
the contrary, it is a sure recipe for instability because in
general we cannot anticipate such further changes long
enough in advance, and a permanent treaty would pre-
vent us from making incremental adjustments when it
becomes clear that they are about to occur. We should
look for an agreement which is not only monitorable, but
one which we can enforce unilaterally, and one that pro-
vides strong incentives for us to enforce compliance. In
fact, we want the incentives for our enforcing the agree-
ment to exceed the incentives for looking the other way.

Disappointment with the use of military power in Iraq has
led to another of what have become recurrent surges in the idea
that "diplomacy" can achieve what the force of arms cannot, and
that agreements with adversaries are the highest expression of
diplomacy. Thus we are deeply engaged in negotiations with Iran
and North Korea in which Albert's high standard defining a good
agreement will almost certainly not be met. And the search is on
for other partners, venues, and contexts in which to negotiate the
cooperation of other states in solving the problems we face.

How will we approach an end to the uranium enrichment
demands of the Iranians? How will we define the prohibited
activities of the North Koreans under an agreement to cause
them to abandon their nuclear weapons program? How should
we respond to Putin's rants about ballistic missile defense or his
threats to abandon arms control agreements reached during the
Soviet period? Can the limitation of greenhouse gases be limited
most effectively by constraints on the consumption of fossil fuels
or by technological innovation?

Albert would certainly not approve relying solely, or even
significantly, on arms control agreements with the Iranians or

387

the North Koreans as a means of halting their nuclear programs.
And, having never been enthusiastic about the ABM Treaty or
the agreements limiting conventional forces, I suspect he would
treat Putin's threats and posturing with benign neglect. As for
global warming, Albert would place a large bet on technology.
He would look at the numbers, the costs of limiting consumption,
the likelihood that our restraint would be vitiated by the behavior
of others, the tradeoffs between limiting economic growth and
investing in technology, and he would look beyond current
thinking for new solutions. And he would be right.

ENDNOTES - Perle

1. Albert Wohlstetter, "On Disconfirmability: A Karl Popper
Sort of Observation on the Troubles with 'Verification','' unpub-
lished, revised December 20, 1984, p. 1, available from the Albert
and Roberta Wohlstetter Papers, Notes, Box 102 Folder 5.

388

The Case for Strategic Force Defense (1969)
Albert Wohlstetteri

From Johan J. H0lst and William Schneider, Jr., eds.. Why
ABM?: PoUcy Issues in the Missile Defense Controversy,
New York: Pergamon Press, 1969, pp. 119-142. Courtesy
of the Wohlstetter Estate.

THE ROLE OF ABM IN THE 1970'S

Since I believe the Safeguard program warrants the sums
involved, and I support it, perhaps I should begin by saying that
I am entirely sympathetic to a rigorous review of the Defense
Budget. I favor getting our safety as cheaply as we can. Moreover,
I believe the Defense Budget has a good deal of fat that can be
cut without substantial harm. I would recommend, for example,
a careful look at the equipment and support costs of our ground
forces, and at our tactical air forces, both land and sea-based.
Some of these seem ineffective, or leveled at threats that are poor-
ly defined or not grave enough to be worth the cost.

Sensible efforts to reduce the Defense Budget, however, would
not center on the strategic offense and defense force. There are, of
course, arguable choices about strategic offense and defense. But
the eight billion dollar plus strategic budget makes up a small
part of the total Defense Budget. It has a paramount importance
for the safety of the country and, indeed, of international society.
Deterring nuclear coercion and nuclear attack on ourselves and
our allies, [and] reducing the damage done in case deterrence
fails, are complex and uncertain functions; but because they are
crucial, the part of the Defense Budget devoted to them has been
the most studied and is better understood than any of the rest.

Nonetheless, sizable uncertainties are intrinsic. They affect
the predictions of scientists as well as the military and limit the
reductions we can make without excessive risk. The strategic
forces will need continuing adjustment to predicted and to some
unanticipated changes in the state of the art. But such adjustments
need not entail drastic changes up or down in long term levels of
spending.

A start in deploying ABM [anti-ballistic missile defenses], I
believe, is a prudent response to changes in the state of the art

389

available to ourselves and to our adversaries. As strategic systems
go, it is a modest program. It is subject to review and can be
halted or stretched out. The average annual cost of the completed
program on a five year basis is less than one-fifth of what we were
spending for active defense against manned bombers at the end of
the 1950's. Nor is it at all likely to start a quantitative arms spiral.
Indeed, despite the stereotype, there has been no quantitative
arms race in the strategic offense and defense budget, no "ever-
accelerating increase," nor, in fact, any long term increase at all.
The budget for strategic offense and defense forces in fiscal 1962
was 11.3 billion dollars.^ The proposed fiscal 1970 budget, as of
June, comes to about 8 billion dollars. Adjusted for price changes,
the 1962 figure was well over fifty percent higher than that for
1970, perhaps even as much as two-thirds higher.

There is an important difference between making qualitative
adjustments to technical change and expanding the number
of vehicles or megatons or dollars spent. The difference has
been ignored in a debate on ABM that seems at the same time
impassioned and very abstract, quite removed from the concrete
political, economic, and military realities of nuclear offense and
defense and their actual history. For example, one alternative to
protecting Minuteman is to buy more Minutemen without pro-
tection. But adding new vehicles is costly and more destabilizing
than an active defense of these hard points, since it increases the
capacity to strike first. A one-sided self-denial of new technology
can lead simply to multiplying our missiles and budgets, or to a
decrease in safety, or to both.

Active defense against ballistic missiles in the 1970's will
have an important role to play in maintaining a protected and
responsible second-strike capacity. The projected Safeguard de-
fense of the national command authority and of the bomber and
Minuteman bases are directed to this end. And it has a useful
function in providing an area defense against attacks involving
modest numbers of apparent incoming missiles.

There have been so many charges that the Safeguard program
was invented in bad faith in March of this year as a gimmick to
answer critics of the Sentinel city defense that I would stress that in
1967, long before the present Administration quite independently
decided on Safeguard, the evidence of advancing technology
convinced me that ABM in the 1970' s would have essentially the
uses the Administration suggests for Safeguard, and in the same
order: to defend the offense and, given this, at a small extra cost

390

to provide a light area defense of population.^ In fact, there is a
substantial continuity between the ABM decisions of the present
and past Administrations. The last Administration called for an
ABM area defense but said it would furnish an economic basis for
defending Minuteman if the threat grew. It had been weighing
and it continued to weigh this decision for some time — indeed
itself requested some funds for hardpoint defense in its own
version of the 1970 fiscal budget.

Like the Republicans now, the Democrats in 1967 were
charged with directing their ABM decision against the opposing
party. I would recommend to opponents of ABM that they con-
template the possibility that the decisions were made in good faith
in both cases, and that we turn to the substance of the issues.

There are other political and military functions of an ABM
system than protecting the offense and offering an area defense
of civilians against light attack. I would like to say something
about each of these two latter roles and also something about
the doctrine of Minimum Deterrence on which much opposition
to the ABM is based, but time permits comment mostly on the
protected offense function.

ABM as a Part of a Second-Strike Force in the 1970's

For one superpower as against another, getting and keeping
a responsible second-strike force is feasible but hard. It requires
thought, effort, and continuing realistic adjustments to tech-
nological change. Minimum Deterrence theorists, who call for no
defense of our civilians and nearly total reliance on a threat to
bombard enemy civilians, have always claimed that the attacker
inevitably must expend many strategic vehicles to destroy only
one of the vehicles attacked. No such generalization holds. It has
depended and always must depend on the changing capabilities
of the offense and on the kind and degree of protection of the force
attacked. At one time, for example, both we and the Russians had
very many unprotected aircraft concentrated on a base within the
lethal radius of a single bomb. On a two-wing base, for example,
we had as many as one hundred thirty aircraft; on a one-wing
base sixty-five medium bombers and tankers. And the planned
response time was too slow for the reliable warning likely to
be available. Small numbers of vehicles could have destroyed
much larger numbers of the vehicles they attacked. Under some
realistically determined conditions, the ratio would have favored

391

the attacker by one to eight or more. These vulnerabilities had
nothing to do with the supposed missile gap. In fact they preceded
such predictions.

There is always a temptation in such circumstances to resort
to responses that are automatic or that bypass national command.
Advocates of sole reliance on city bombardment forces have from
the time this doctrine first gained currency been tempted to prove
that response was certain by making it automatic, by shortcutting
responsible political decision.* But the decision to launch ICBM's
against Russian cities would be perhaps the most momentous
choice ever made in all of history. It would be the decision for
World War III. If this awful decision is ever made it should be
based on as much information as we can get and it should be made
by as high a political authority as possible. It is the last decision
we should contemplate delegating to a computer.

The revival today, by several distinguished senators and
some able physicists opposing ABM, of the suggestion that,
rather than defend ICBM's [intercontinental ballistic missiles],
we should launch them at Russian cities simply on the basis of
radar represents a long step backward. If we were willing to do
this, we would dispense with silos or Poseidon submarines or any
other mode of protecting our missiles. And we would increase the
nightmare possibility of nuclear war by mistake.

Understanding of the complex problems of designing a
protected and responsible nuclear strategic force has grown
slowly among scientists as well as laymen, civilians as well as
soldiers, Democrats as well as Republicans. But it has grown, and
decisively. The United States has designed and deployed a second-
strike force capable of riding out an attack, and there have been
large improvements in protecting responsible command. This was
accomplished not by merely expanding nuclear bombardment
forces, but in essence by shifting to forces with protection against
the changing threat. The stereotype repeated throughout the
1960's that our security has declined while our strategic force
grew at an accelerating rate is grossly wrong on both counts. In
the past some key programs increased the protected second-strike
capacity of the force, while cutting at the same time billions of
dollars from the spending projected.

In the 1970's unless we continue to make appropriate deci-
sions to meet technological change, once again the viability of
a large part of our second-strike force will be put in question.
Several related innovations, but in particular the development

392

of a rocket booster carrying many reentry vehicles each aimed
precisely at a different target, raise once again the possibility of
attack ratios favoring the attacker. One reentry vehicle may kill
a booster carrying several. One booster can carry the means of
destroying many boosters.

Raising a question about the future second-strike capacity of
any part of our strategic force implies nothing about the present
intentions of an adversary to strike first or even to be able in the
future effectively to strike first. The recent debate on whether
the Soviet missile, SS-9, is a "first-strike weapon" or whether the
Russians intend it to be seems beside the point. If by maintaining
our second-strike capability we can make the risks of striking
very great, this can affect an adversary's intentions favorably
to ourselves. It can deter him even in a crisis, like the one over
missiles in Cuba, when the alternative to striking may look bad,
but not, if we are careful, as bad as striking. Moreover, we ought
not to talk of "first-strike weapons" and "second-strike weapons"
as if this could be settled simply by looking at the weapons on one
side. Whether or not a weapons system can preclude substantial
retaliation will depend on many uncertain future performance
characteristics of the forces on both sides. The test of whether
one has a responsible second-strike capacity is whether one can,
under nuclear attack, preserve vehicles, decision centers, and the
flow of communications among them, whether one can transmit
the order to retaliate and penetrate adversary defenses to reach
targets. If we were unwilling even to entertain the hypothesis
of a first-strike, we would do nothing to protect any part of our
strategic forces or its control centers by making them mobile or
hard or defended by ABM. Some leading scientists who oppose
currently deploying ABM say they will favor it for the defense
of Minuteman when precise MIRV's [multiple independently
targetable reentry vehicles] and the related offense technologies
are likely to be available to the Russians. That calendar date, and
not present Soviet intent, is then a major substantive issue for
these opponents. And their position recognizes that we want to
maintain the second-strike capacity — not of just one, but of all
major vehicle types in our strategic force: Minuteman, bombers,
and Poseidon.

In designing a second-strike force, there are excellent reasons
for making it a substantial mixture of vehicles of several quite
different types: land as well as sea-based, manned as well as un-
manned, each with its own mode of protection. Such systems

393

have differing limitations, are subject to varied and independent
uncertainties, require distinct modes of attack and, if each type
is protected, greatly complicate the attack. It is a serious matter,
then, if a large part of this mixture is badly affected by changing
adversary forces and technologies. The forces deployed and the
state of the art available to the Russians will influence other parts
of our strategic force than Minuteman silos. And ABM has a role
to play, for example, in protecting the important fixed elements
of a mobile force, including the politically responsible command
centers. Preserving command, control and communications is
always hard, and particularly so for mobile sea-based systems.

My remarks, however, center, so far as the second-strike
function of ABM is concerned, on the problem of protecting
Minuteman. We have good cause to preserve the second-strike
capability of so large a proportion of our strategic force. Even if
it were true that the United States needed only a few strategic
vehicles surviving, buying and paying for the operation of a great
many that had become vulnerable to attack would be a very poor
way to obtain those few surviving. There are safer and cheaper
ways of getting a force of a given size than to buy a much larger
one, most of which is susceptible to annihilation.

How does the planned timing of our ABM deployment com-
pare to the date when it is reasonably likely that Russian offense
technology could badly worsen the effectiveness of our projected
Minuteman III? The first point to note is that the proposed Safe-
guard deployment has extended lead times. It can stretch out
further if continuing review of intelligence suggests it should,
but the shortest schedule calls for completing this program early
in 1976. If, as ABM opponents stress in other connections, there
is likely to be a substantial shakedown period, we are talking of
1977 or later. If, as has been suggested, we delay decision for an-
other year or more and then proceed to design and develop an
entirely new ABM, we are talking of the 1980' s.

Second, predicting exact calendar dates at which technolo-
gies will be available to adversaries and what their strategic
significance will be is very hard, and we are not very good at it.
Moreover, we have erred not only on the side of overestimating
Russian capabilities, but often by underestimating them. At earlier
dates we were surprised by the rapid Soviet achievement of the
A-bomb, the H-bomb, advanced jet engines, long-range turbo-
prop bombers, airborne intercept radars, and large-scale fissile-

394

material production. And scientists have been surprised, not only
military men.^

Third, the public discussion has not stressed how sensitively
the accuracy of attack affects the viability of the hardened force
attacked. Accuracy affects the number of weapons required to
destroy a hard target very much more than the bomb yield or the
overpressure resistance of the target. Roughly speaking, for such
targets, improving accuracy by a factor of slightly more than two
is the same as increasing bomb yield tenfold and serves essentially
to offset a tenfold increase in overpressure resistance.

I have tried to reconstruct various numerical proofs recently
presented or distributed to the Congress that purport to show that
Minuteman will be quite safe without any extra protection; these
proofs depend heavily on optimistic estimates of limitations in
Russian delivery accuracies, reliabilities, and associated offense
capabilities and sometimes on very poor offense tactics.' Suppose,
however, that by 1976 when Safeguard is deployed, or by 1977
when it may be shaken down, the Russians have:

1. accuracies like those of the systems we are deploying now^

2. over-all reliabilities currently attributable to them

3. methods familiar to us for using extensive and timely infor-
mation as to which missiles have failed so that others can
replace them

4. continued production of SS-9 boosters at past rates

5. modest numbers of MIRV's per booster (e.g., the three five-
megaton reentry vehicles stated by Secretary Laird for the SS-
9).

Then the percentage of the Minuteman force that would be
destroyed, if undefended, comes to about ninety-five percent.

These results are based on quite moderate assumptions about
Russian capabilities. Better accuracies, for example, may be ex-
pected in the late 1970' s, and higher degrees of MIRVing. Re-
liabilities of any given offense missile system improve with use.
Do those who favor a hardpoint defense but would postpone a
start really consider these Russian capabilities I have outlined
"extremely implausible"? Or at all implausible?

There is a striking inconsistency in the way ABM opponents
treat the Chinese and the Russians. In contemplating the possibili-
ty of a Russian offense against our Minuteman, they assume that
Russians who cannot by 1976 or 1977 — twenty years after Sput-
nik—do what we know how to do now. When considering the

395

ability of the Chinese to penetrate an ABM defense, they attribute
to them penetration systems that cost us many billions of dollars,
a dozen years of trials and many failures to develop, and they
assume this for the first generation Chinese missiles. These are
rather backward Russians and very advanced Chinese. Moreover
since in the Russian case we are considering a potential threat to
our second-strike capability and we want this to be highly reliable,
we want particularly to avoid underestimating the threat. But we
should undertake a modest defense of population if it works in
the expected case, even if on extremely pessimistic assumptions
it might not. Here again it seems to me the ABM critics get things
exactly backwards.

Finally, the fact that such impending developments in Russian
offense may make it necessary to do something more to protect
the fixed elements of our force should come as no surprise. It was
the sensitive effects of missile inaccuracy that in the early 1950' s
suggested to the original proponents of programs for hardening
strategic vehicles against ICBM attack that

a. hardening would be an important and effective method of
protection against ICBM attack in the 1960's; and that

b. by itself hardening would not be adequate for much past the
1960's.

The ICBM's then expected in the 1960's were, of course,
enormously faster than manned bombers, and therefore would
out-mode some programs that served very well in the 1950's;
but the early ICBM's were likely to be much less accurate than
the manned bombers. They were expected to have inaccuracies
measured in miles, perhaps, it seemed then, as large as five miles,
compared to the quarter of a nautical mile or fifteen hundred feet
median miss distance associated with manned bombers. Since
just doubling inaccuracy could affect weapons requirements by
a factor of four, hardening clearly seemed a good idea. The paper
proposing hardening for the 1960's was entitled "Defending a
Strategic Force after 1960" and was put out on February 1, 1954.
That paper included a very short section called "After After 1960"
that is quite relevant for understanding why we should expect
that we will have to adapt the current Minuteman to impending
changes in opposing offense technology. The section read in full:

The foregoing also suggests that even against the bal-
listic missile this defense would have a finite life. The

396

missile might improve drastically in accuracy and pay-
load. However, the date at which the Russians will have
a missile capable of carrying a 25 MT bomb with a 1500
ft. CEP [circular error probable] appears sufficiently far
removed to make the defense good, let's say, until the
end of the Sixties (p. 91).

That the numbers cited in this paper of February 1954 so closely
match some of those being talked of for the SS-9 is, of course,
purely a coincidence. They were performance characteristics of
bombers then current. However, the quotation illustrates that,
from the outset, it was to be expected that sooner or later and
probably in the 1970' s, hardening would not be enough by itself.
The discussion also suggests that to depend merely on further
hardening would make the system vulnerable to further improve-
ments in accuracy.

Hardening can be outpaced by further development in pre-
cision. This does not mean that for some possible threats a com-
bination of ABM and extreme hardening might not be useful. It
might. But as a complete substitute for ABM extreme hardening
has drawbacks. It is subject, in my opinion, to much larger un-
certainties as to both performance and costs than the ABM.

The major components of the Safeguard system have received
elaborate study and testing. Ideas for brand new ABM systems
to defend hard points that I am familiar with are not serious
competitors in this time period. We should start deploying the
system now on the schedule suggested and we should expect, as
in the case of every other offense and defense system, that we
shall learn a great deal from operational experience, make some
changes and retrofits. This seems to me a sound way to supplement
the protection of the Minuteman in a period when we can expect
it to be endangered.

ON THE COUNTERFORCE CALCULATIONS OF SOME
PROMINENT ABM OPPONENTS'*

In preparing the preceding portion of this chapter on the role
of ABM in the 1970's, I undertook to review and test my past
views on the subject and once again to form my own independent
judgment. I, therefore, did not rely on calculations of either the
government or its critics. I took the relevant classified and public
data and performed my own analysis.

397

The kind of analysis involved in obtaining a protected and
responsible strategic force has been my principal concern for
eighteen years starting with the study that gave rise to the first-
strike/ second-strike distinction and to a good many other con-
cepts and modes of protecting and controlling strategic forces cited
by both sides in the present debate. The ABM has other functions
that I support, but my chapter in the space available focused on
its role in defending Minuteman. As I stressed there, these are
complex and intrinsically uncertain matters. Where scientists
differ on them, laymen may be tempted simply to throw up their
hands and choose to rely on the authority of those scientists they
favor. I feel, however, that the substantive differences among the
scientists, if carefully explained, are quite accessible to interested
readers and that such careful explanation can help them form
their own judgment as to which conclusions are sound.

On the Safely of Minuteman

In my statement to the Senate Armed Services Committee
on April 23, 1 said, "I have tried to reconstruct various numerical
proofs recently presented or distributed to the Congress that
purport to show our Minuteman will be safe without any extra
protection; these proofs depend heavily on optimistic estimates
of limitations in Russian delivery accuracies, reliabilities, associat-
ed offense capabilities, and sometimes on poor offense tactics."
In response to questions from members of the Committee, I
illustrated several troubles with these attempted proofs of the
safety of Minuteman, but there was no time to explain their de-
fects adequately. I would like to try to do that now, and to com-
ment specifically on the calculations of Dr. Rathjens, Dr. Lapp, and
of the Federation of American Scientists. Some of the comments,
particularly those of Dr. Lapp, bear also on some unevidenced
statements on this subject by Prof. Chayes and Dr. Panofsky and,
more recently, by Dr. Wiesner.

Though my own calculations were based on classified as well
as public data, my summary of results, like that of Dr. Rathjens,
was unclassified and so are the comments I am about to make.
This will prevent explicit specification of some of the numbers
assumed by Dr. Rathjens and by myself and inevitably it forces
some roundaboutness of expression. I am able to state, for ex-
ample, that Dr. Rathjens and I assume the same accuracy for the
Russian SS-9 in the mid- and late 1970's. I can say that the SS-9

398

is now expected (and, before the Nixon Administration, was
expected) to achieve that accuracy years in advance of this late
time period. And I can say, as Dr. Rathjens did, that the accuracy
we have assumed for the Russians, in this late time period, is
essentially the same as that estimated for our own MIRV carrying
missiles, namely Poseidon and Minuteman III.' But I cannot say
what that accuracy is.

I, therefore, submitted a classified statement in which the
essential numerical assumptions are explicit and related to intel-
ligence estimates. However, even without the classified state-
ments, some essential defects of the calculations of Dr. Rathjens,
Dr. Lapp, and the Federation of American Scientists can be made
clear.

Dr. Rathjens' Calculations

Dr. Rathjens has stated, "Even if the Soviet SS-9 missile
force were to grow as rapidly as the Defense Department's most
worrisome projections, even if the Soviet Union were to develop
and employ MIRV's with those missiles and even if they achieved
accuracies as good as we apparently expect with our MIRV forces
(according to figures released in late 1967 by former Deputy Secre-
tary of Defense Nitze), a quarter of our Minuteman force could be
expected to survive a Soviet preemptive SS-9 attack. That quarter
alone would be more than enough to inflict unacceptable damage
on the U.S.S.R."!"

My own parallel calculations for the mid- and late 1970's,
using what I described as moderate assumptions, show about
five percent surviving. What explains the difference? Since Dr.
Rathjens and I compared notes on April 22, 1 am able to fix quite
precisely where we agreed and where we differed.

Our assumptions agreed in the accuracy assumed for the SS-9,
in the overall reliability rate, in the numbers of SS-9 boosters (500)
and in the use of several independently aimed reentry vehicles in
each booster. Our assumptions differed on three key points: in the
degree of blast resistance assumed for our Minuteman silos, in the
yield of the Russian reentry vehicles, and in the use or non-use by
the Russians of substantial information about what missiles are
unready at launch or fail in early stages.

On the first point, I have explained that Dr. Rathjens assumed
that Minuteman silos were two-thirds more blast resistant than
I did, and two-thirds more blast resistant than they are officially

399

estimated to be. He derived his assumption by reading several
points off an unclassified chart showing the probability of a
Minuteman silo being destroyed as a function of accuracy for
various bomb yields. Then by using standard rules for weapons
effects he inferred the overpressure resistance of Minuteman silos.
However, the curves on the unclassified chart cannot be correctly
read to imply the overpressure resistance Dr. Rathjens infers. His
reading of the curves was in error.

Second, I assumed three 5-megaton reentry vehicles for
each SS-9, as in Secretary Laird's public statements. Dr. Rathjens
assumed four 1-megaton reentry vehicles. More than four reentry
vehicles can be fitted on the SS-9, if the payload is only one mega-
ton. However, the three 5-megaton reentry vehicles, given the
accuracy we both assume, and given the actual blast resistance
of the Minuteman, do enough for the attacker. Using his lower
Russian bomb yield and his overestimated Minuteman blast re-
sistance. Dr. Rathjens derived a probability of about sixty percent
that one arriving Russian reentry vehicle would destroy one
Minuteman silo. If he had used the officially estimated 5-megaton
reentry vehicle and the actual blast resistance of the Minuteman
silo, the probability would have been nearly ninety -nine percent.
If he had used three 5-megaton reentry vehicles per booster for
the SS-9 and the correct estimate for blast resistance, he would
have found only sixteen percent, instead of twenty-five percent of
the Minuteman force surviving. Alternatively, if he had used the
classified estimates of the number of 1-megaton reentry vehicles
that can be fitted on an SS-9 booster, his calculations would have
shown about 7.3 percent surviving. The combined significance
of these first two points of difference between Dr. Rathjens and
myself is then considerable.

The third point of difference between our calculations is that
Dr. Rathjens assumes that the Russians would have to salvo all of
their missiles with no information as to which had been unready
or failed in time to be discovered, or at any rate with no use of
such information. However, it is familiar that better methods are
available and are of considerable utility for an offense that wants to
assure a very high percentage of destruction of the force attacked.
Most missiles that are counted as "unreliable" (excluded from the
figure of overall reliability) are either not ready for launch or fail at
launch, and this information can be made available immediately.
A substantial additional fraction that fail do so at burnout, and
information as to whether burnout velocity is within expected

400

TABLE 1

CALCULATIONS ON THE VULNERABILITY OF THE

MINUTEMAN FORCE IN THE LATE I970's

IF NO EXTRA PROTECTION

Difference Between Assumptions
Dr. Rathjens and Myself

Used by

Number of SS-9's

: Same (500)

Over-all reliability

: Same

Accuracy

: Same

Minuteman
Blast
Resistance

( Dr. Ratbjens'
( Mine

2/3 higher than
official estimate
Official estimate

SS-9 payload

^ Dr. Ratbjens'
) Mine

4 reentry vehicles at
1 MT (less than
SS-9 capability)
. 3at 5 MT(SS-9
capability)

Use of partial
information on
missile malfunctions

Dr. Rathjens'
Mine

: Not used
: Used

Effect of Assumptions on
Minuteman Survivability

Dr. Rathjens' result

Adjust for correct Minuteman blast resis-
tance and three 5 MT M 1 RV per SS-9

Alternatively adjust for correct Minuteman
blast resistance and number of 1 MT MIRV
warheads the SS-9 is capable of carrying

Using correct Minuteman blast resistance,
three 5 MT MIRV per SS-9, and informa-
tion as to missile jnalfunctions before or
during launch only

Using con^ct Minuteman blast resistance,
the correct number of 1 MT warheads per
SS-9, and information as to missile mal-
functions before and during launch only

Using correct Minuteman blast resistance
and either the 5 MT MIRV or the I MT
MIRV option, and information as to mis-
sile malfunctions including one-half those
that fail after launch

Minuteman
Surviving

25%
16%

7.3%

The table above summarizes the differences between Dr. Rathjens'
and my calculations.

401

tolerances can also be made quickly available. For radio-guided
missiles this is almost automatic, but inertial systems can also
radio this information back, as the telemetering in a missile flight
test program shows. Later flight information is also feasible.
While some fraction of the failures will remain unknown, a large
proportion can be known. Therefore, instead of salvoing all extra
missiles blindly, to make up for all unreadiness and all failures
without knowing where they occur, one can reprogram some
extra missiles to replace the large proportion of known failures.
Using a current planning factor for the proportion of the unreliable
missiles that cannot be replaced on the basis of timely information,
the calculations using three 5-megaton reentry vehicles show
considerably greater destruction. Instead of sixteen percent
surviving, the approximate five percent survival that I mentioned
previously results. It should be observed that this ability of
the 5MT force to destroy five percent of the Minuteman force
presumes that only about one-half the failures after launching are
replaced — a figure well within the state of the art. Moreover, even
limiting the use of information to missile malfunctions before or
during launch, the 5MT MIRV force would leave only eight or
nine percent surviving.

Finally, such techniques of using substantial timely informa-
tion as to which missiles cannot be relied on are less important for
cases where smaller yields and larger numbers of reentry vehicles
per booster are used. For the 1-megaton multiple reentry vehicle
case I have referred to, the expected number of Minutemen surviv-
ing reduces from approximately 7.3 percent without using such
techniques, to five percent using them. The errors in Dr. Rathjens'
calculations are not amended simply by taking into account the
possibility of reprogramming.

Dr. Lapp's Calculations

Dr. Ralph Lapp's calculations were not presented at a Senate
Hearing. However, one set of his calculations was presented as
a two page appendix to his statement called "The Case Against
Missile Defense," and they were featured in front page stories early
in April in leading newspapers, describing Dr. Lapp as science
advisor to the Senate opposition. These calculations attacking the
credibility of a threat to the Minuteman itself apparently achieved
widespread credence. They contain several grave errors, some of
which have been pointed out independently by myself on April

402

23, 1969, before the Senate Armed Services Committee, by Dr.
Lawrence O'Neill before the House Armed Services Committee,
and by Professor Eugene Wigner before the American Physi-
cal Society on April 29th. Yet these statements pointing out Dr.
Lapp's errors have received little or no newspaper notice. It is
therefore worth reviewing Dr. Lapp's calculations, particularly so
since one of his most blatant errors appears to have been adopted
uncritically by some of the other witnesses before the Committee,
specifically Professor Chayes and Dr. Panofsky."

Dr. Lapp states that his calculations are based on "maximum
values" for Soviet capabilities. He shows seventy-six percent of
the Minuteman surviving, compared to Dr. Rathjens' twenty-five
and my five percent. Moreover, he has several assumptions that
agree with my own:

1. Three 5-megaton reentry vehicles per SS-9, and

2. An accuracy estimate derived, like Dr. Rathjens', from
public indications of the great precision of our Poseidon or
Minuteman MIRV's.

His combined assumptions about the yield and accuracy of an
SS-9 reentry vehicle and the blast resistance of the Minuteman re-
sult in very high probabilities that a single arriving reentry vehicle
will destroy a Minuteman silo.

He suggests that two and one-half warheads of 5-megaton
power with a half nautical mile inaccuracy or CEP^^ are needed
to destroy a 200 psi target with a ninety-five percent probability,
and 1.1 warheads would have that probability if the CEP were
a quarter of a nautical mile. In fact, using standard methods of
calculation, at a half-mile inaccuracy, two warheads would yield
a ninety-six percent destruction probability and at a quarter of
a mile inaccuracy one warhead would have a more than ninety-
nine percent probability of destroying a 200 psi target. Either
Dr. Lapp's calculations are based on some rather exotic and
unspecified method, or they are in error. But in any case it is ap-
parent that, even using his methods, he derives a very high single
shot kill probability, roughly comparable to my own.

How then does Dr. Lapp's Minuteman force, faced by sup-
posedly "maximum" Russian capabilities, come out so much
better than even Dr. Rathjens' Minuteman force? First, Dr. Lapp
assumes a much smaller number of SS-9's than Dr. Rathjens and
I. He assumes three hundred thirty-three SS-9's. This is hardly a
maximum force. It is less than the number that would be produced

403

at past rates by continuing production into the relevant 1976-77
time period. At three reentry vehicles per booster. Dr. Lapp's
assumption would give the Russians about one thousand reentry
vehicles.

Second, he assumes that the Russians would use only three-
fourths of their SS-9 force, that is, about two hundred fifty SS-9's
(or 750 reentry vehicles). This extraordinary failure to use a fourth
of the force most adapted to the purpose of destroying Minuteman
is attributed to a supposed universal rule that military strategists
always keep forces in reserve. This may or may not be true for tank
battles or aircraft attacks in a conventional war. (The June 1967
war in the Middle East suggests it is not a sound generalization
even about attacks with aircraft at the start of a non-nuclear war.)
But as a universal rule for a nuclear first-strike? Dr. Lapp does not
say for what these SS-9's would be reserved.

Most important. Dr. Lapp forgets that the Soviet Union has a
great many intercontinental missiles besides the SS-9 and exceed-
ing the SS-9 in numbers by a large amount. These missiles would
seem to furnish a reserve that might satisfy a military strategist.

Third, he assumes overall reliabilities that are quite a bit
lower than the reliabilities that Dr. Rathjens and I assumed, also
lower than those attributed to the SS-9. As a result of the three
assumptions, Dr. Lapp's Russians would have substantially
less than half as many reliable arriving reentry vehicles as our
thousand Minuteman silos. More than half the Minuteman force
would then be untouched by SS-9 reentry vehicles.

Finally, Dr. Lapp makes an assumption that is plainly ab-
surd. He supposes that even though each warhead has a very
high probability of destroying a single silo, "any military realist"
would fire two of his outnumbered attacking reentry vehicles at
each silo that is attacked. This would leave three-fourths of the
silos untouched. But if each warhead has a ninety-nine percent
probability of destroying a single silo, firing two at one silo would
merely increase the probability of destroying that specific silo to
99.99% but would make it quite certain that a silo that could have
been destroyed will go unscathed. If a more sensible tactic were
followed, namely to fire each of the two missiles at a different silo,
there would be a probability of ninety-eight percent of destroying
both silos and a probability of 99.99% that at least one of the two
would be destroyed. (This latter is the same probability that Dr.
Lapp would have achieved against the specific one that he was
aiming at.) In short. Dr. Lapp's tactic would greatly reduce the

404

expected level of destruction achieved by the attack, and it would
not increase the probability of achieving some minimum level of
destruction. I know of no military realist who would regard Dr.
Lapp's tactic as a sensible one for the attacker. I must agree with
Dr. Wigner that Dr. Lapp has presumed that his adversary would
be unbelievably stupid.

It should be observed that the absurdity of the tactic is not
dependent on the roughly ninety-nine percent single shot kill
probability implicit in Dr. Lapp's accuracy, yield and resistance
assumptions. If one were to use a ninety-five percent shot destruc-
tion probability, the point is equally obvious. In this latter case, an
adversary who assigned one missile to each of two targets would
have a better than ninety percent chance of getting them both and
a probability of 99%% of getting at least one; and he could get
no better than a 99%% probability of getting one silo if he sent
both missiles against one silo. In the latter case, however, he could
destroy at most one silo.

Professor Chayes and Dr. Panofsky have made statements
suggesting they also accept the principle of sending at least two
missiles to each silo. Professor Chayes said in his statement to the
Senate Armed Services Committee on April 23:

... it is agreed that the attacker would need at the very
minimum 2,000 accurate warheads — two for every one
of our silos — before being able to think about a first
strike.

Professor Panofsky in his statement to the Senate Armed Services
Committee on April 22 stated:

Moreover, an attacker would have to compensate for the
limited reliability of his force by targeting at least two
and possibly more warheads against each of the 1,000
Minuteman silos.

The reason behind these two statements is less explicit than
Dr. Lapp's. Dr. Panofsky is talking about compensating for un-
reliability rather than inaccuracy, but it seems plain that no such
universal rule makes sense.

Dr. Lapp has a second set of calculations published on May
4, 1969, in The New York Times Magazine}^ There he assumes the
Russians may have five hundred rather than three hundred thirty-

405

three SS-9's. Since he again assumes three reentry vehicles per
booster, this makes a total of 1,500 reentry vehicles. He apparently
avoids the obviously bad strategies of reserving a quarter of the
force, and then using the remainder to attack only half the targets
they are capable of destroying with high probability. Nonetheless,
once again his calculations show very high survival rates: "500 to
750 operable Minuteman." With these changed assumptions, how
does the outcome continue to remain so favorable to Minuteman' s
survival?

Dr. Lapp has made some other changes. He has reduced the
yield of the SS-9 reentry vehicles by twenty percent, increased
his estimate of the hardness of the Minuteman by fifty percent,
and, most important, he now uses very large inaccuracies for the
SS-9, 3,600 feet in one case and 5,500 feet in the other. The latter
great inaccuracy assures him his seven hundred fifty operable
Minuteman surviving. But there is no justification for assuming
such great inaccuracies in the mid- and late 1970's. One of the
few constants in Dr. Lapp's various calculations appears to be his
conclusion.

Calculations of Dr. Steven Weinberg and Dr. Jerome Wiesner (in ABM:
An Evaluation of the Decision to Employ an Anti-Ballistic Missile
System, edited by Abram Chayes and Jerome Wiesner, New York,
1969)

Dr. Weinberg and Dr. Wiesner present variants of the same
calculation to show the safety of the Minuteman force. Dr. Wein-
berg supposes that at least 2,100 reliable arriving reentry vehicles
"with megaton yield and high accuracy" would be needed to des-
troy all but 42 of our 1,050 ICBM silos. He appears to assume an
eighty percent single shot kill probability. Dr. Weinberg doesn't
indicate the exact blast resistance, yield, and inaccuracy assump-
tions that go into his eighty percent hypothetical kill probability,
and the testimony of Deputy Secretary Packard that he cites in
that connection offers no basis for such a determination.^* Mr.
Packard there shows for three different bomb yields a spectrum
of probabilities varying from less than ten percent to one hundred
percent as accuracy varies from a mile or so down below one-
tenth of a mile. Mr. Packard does not say what the accuracy of
any SS-9 reentry vehicle is expected to be so that no specific single
shot kill probability can be inferred from his testimony.

406

Dr. Wiesner assumes five hundred reliable SS-9's, each carry-
ing three MIRV's; or more exactly fifteen hundred reliable MIRV's.
And he also assumes an eighty percent kill probability for each
arriving reentry vehicle. He justifies this with the statement that
a 5-megaton reentry vehicle would have to be used and that "at
best the MIRV guidance system will be accurate enough to give
only a 0.8 kill probability for the unit."^^ One can read directly
from Deputy Secretary Packard's chart that Dr. Wiesner is thus
implying that accuracies less than about 2,400 feet are not possible
in the time period in question. Dr. Wiesner has given no technical
argument to support this assertion; it is at variance with expected
accuracies for our own MIRV systems, and it is at variance with
the accuracy that the intelligence community has for some time
expected the SS-9 to achieve years before the late 1970's time
period, and with the accuracy assumed by Dr. Rathjens. At the
5-megaton yield and with the expected SS-9 accuracy the single
shot kill probability for each reliable arriving reentry vehicle
would be very much higher than eighty percent as I have already
pointed out elsewhere.

If Dr. Wiesner had used three 5-megaton reentry vehicles,
the expected accuracy of the SS-9's and, furthermore, had
incorporated expected reliabilities, his calculations would have
shown only sixty-three out of 1,100 hard targets surviving, that
is 5.7%. Or if he had used the expected accuracy and reliabilities
and the number of 1-megaton vehicles deliverable by the SS-9, he
would have arrived at substantially the same result: sixty-eight
out of 1,100 surviving.

There are a number of less critical flaws in Dr. Weinberg's
and Dr. Wiesner' s calculations. The essential, however, is that
they both assume combinations of accuracy, yield, and number of
reentry vehicles per booster that are less effective than intelligence
expects (and for some time has expected) of the SS-9.

The Calculations of the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), March
8, 1969

These calculations of the FAS were published nearly a week
before the President's decision on the Safeguard System was an-
nounced. The FAS statement was intended to refute in advance
the need for extra protection of the Minuteman force. However,
the calculations it presents are basically irrelevant since they use
only the Russian force "at the present time," and they assume

407

larger inaccuracies than intelligence attributes to the Russians' SS-
9's for the later time period. They do not use MIRV's and in fact,
according to their author, they do not use the SS-9 at all.

In the first section of this chapter,^* I said that the many
confident assertions current that Minuteman will be safe with-
out extra protection in the late 1970's are unjustified. These sup-
plementary comments have illustrated and analyzed some essen-
tial flaws in these assertions: they depend on erroneous estimates
about the blast resistance of our own forces or wishful estimates
about Russian lacks either in accuracy or in other capabilities
or in competent tactics in that time period; they do not, as they
claim, use "the most worrisome projections" and the "maximum
capabilities" for Russian forces. In fact even my own calcula-
tions showing that the Minuteman will be vulnerable if extra
protection is not provided do not use "maximum" Russian cap-
abilities. Greater accuracies, for example, are quite feasible in the
late 1970's for the Russians. I have used the CEP attributed to the
SS-9 in the early 1970's. If the SS-9's CEP should be two-hundred
fifty feet smaller than that estimate, then only four-hundred SS-9's
using megaton range reentry vehicles would destroy about ninety
five percent of the Minuteman force. Or with the larger force even
greater percentages of the Minuteman force could be destroyed
if we do nothing to supplement its protection. As I emphasized
in my statement on April 23rd, the expected vulnerability of a
hardened force is extremely sensitive to the accuracy of the force
attacking. The accuracy assumed by Dr. Rathjens and myself is
not only attributed to the SS-9 in the early 1970's, it is also the
accuracy we estimate for our own MIRV's. Programs for achieving
still greater accuracies for some of our MIRV's have been drawn
up though not funded.

I have focused on the problem of protecting Minuteman,
because, as I have stressed, we need a mixed force and have
good reason to preserve the second-strike capability of so large
a proportion of our strategic force. Even if it were true that the
United States needed only a few strategic vehicles to survive,
buying and paying for the operation of a great many that had
become vulnerable to attack would be a very poor way to obtain
those few surviving. There are safer and cheaper ways of getting
a force of a given size than to buy a much larger one, most of
which is susceptible to annihilation. To maintain a force most of
which could be used only in a first-strike, hardly contributes to
stability.

408

It is sometimes said that such analyses of the potential vul-
nerability of Minuteman are like the talk of the bomber gap in the
early 1950's and the missile gap at the end of the 1950's. Noth-
ing could be further from the truth. Most of those who talked of
bomber gaps and missile gaps raised these possibilities to argue
for expanding the number of our own bombers or missiles to close
the gap. They thought of the problem as one of matching first-
strike forces. But how to maintain a second-strike force cannot
be adequately understood in these terms. Whether or not we
have it depends, as I have said, not simply on the relative size of
two opposing forces, but on a great many characteristics of the
attacking force and of the force attacked and its protection. It is
the opponents of the ABM today who, rather than defend the
offense, would simply expand it. Moreover, many of these same
opponents of the ABM were among the chief propounders of
the missile and bomber gaps in the past; some scientists are now
willing to state that they helped "create the myth of the missile
gap." My own record on this matter is quite clear. Throughout
the 1950's I pointed out the essential irrelevance of matching first-
strike forces and of all the gap theories that flowed from such
matching. For example, in 1956 I wrote:

Exaggerated estimates of Russian force size, for exam-
ple, might be used directly to suggest emulation. But we
have already made clear that determining who has the
best or second best Air Force in being in advance of at-
tack by simply matching numbers or quality is not to
the point. Those who assert that we may have fewer and
perhaps inferior planes than the enemy and still have a
deterrent force must also recognize that we may have
more and even better vehicles and yet have inadequate
deterrence. ^^

The propensity simply to list Russian and American pre-attack
forces measured in various arbitrary ways continues to be ex-
hibited on both sides of the present debate. On one side, first-strike
capabilities are sometimes matched against adversary cities in the
discussions of "overkill." On the other side, first-strike forces of
Russia and the United States are sometimes matched against each
other to show "superiority" or "inferiority" or "parity" or the like.
My point is quite different. Foreseeable technical change in the
1970's compels sober thought about improving the protection of

409

crucial elements in our strategic force. Such change can affect our
second-strike capability. In that connection, I have centered my
discussion on the protection of the Minuteman, but the problem
of protecting our bombers is also important, and, even more, we
must improve our protection of the national political command
vital to the control of sea as well as land-based strategic forces.

ENDNOTES - Wohlstetter - The Case for Strategic Force
Defense

1. This chapter constitutes a slightly edited version of my
Statement to the Senate Armed Services Committee, April 23,
1969, and a supplement submitted on May 23, 1969.

2. DoD Appropriations for 1969, Hearings, Part I. Financial Sum-
mary. Expenditures in the 1950' s were not then broken down by
mission, but strategic budgets were even higher in the late 1950's
than in 1962. In constant prices, for example, 1959 was more than
double 1970.

3. ". . . First, an offense force with such increased accuracies
and reliabilities and with an extensive use of MIRV's is very much
more efficient in attacking the fixed offense force or the important
fixed elements of the mobile force of an adversary. . . . Second,
one result of this sort of change in Russian offense forces is to
make improved antiballistic missiles (rather than simply more
hardening or more missiles) an economic way for the United
States to protect the hard fixed elements of a strategic force. . . .
Third, at a minor increment in the modest cost of a hard-point
ABM defense, it is possible to make available a light ABM for
defense of civil societies against a small submarine or land-based
missile force or part of a large one launched by mistake or without
authorization. . . ." See Albert Wohlstetter, "Strength, Interest and
New Technologies," Address to the September 1967 Institute
of Strategic Studies Conference on the Implications of Military
Technology in the 1970's at Elsinore, Denmark, in Adelphi Papers,
No. 46, p. 4.

4. See, for example, one of the first classic sources of Minimum
Deterrence Doctrine: 1970 Without Arms Confro/, Special Committee
Report, Planning Pamphlet No. 104, Washington, DC: National
Planning Association, 1958, pp. 32-33, and 44.

410

5. We have not been very good at predicting our own or our
adversary's technologies. These matters are intrinsically uncertain.
Eminent scientists at the end of the 1940's predicted that fusion
weapons would be infeasible, and, if feasible, undeliverable,
and, if delivered, of no strategic significance, since it was thought
(erroneously) they could be used only against cities. Some of
those who then thought the threat of fusion bombs against cities
neither moral nor important strategically now take it to be both.
Compare, for example, Hans Bethe's present views with those in
"The Hydrogen Bomb," Scientific American, Vol. 182, No. 4, April
1950, pp. 18-23. In February 1953 an important scientific study
group expected the Soviets would have no ICBM's before the
late I960' s — a prediction plainly in error by the end of the year.
See the final report of the Lincoln Summer Study, among whose
prominent members were James Killian, Jerome B. Wiesner and
Carl Kaysen. Writing in October 1964, Jerome B. Wiesner and
Herbert York, "National Security and the Nuclear Test Ban,"
Scientific American, Vol. 211, No. 4, October 1964, pp. 18, 27-35,
were quite sure that no technological surprises could substantially
change the operational effectiveness of intercontinental delivery
systems, and thus entirely missed the major strategic potential of
precisely aimed MIRV's, a concept that had already emerged in
the classified literature. These were able and informed men. But
exact prediction on these matters defies confident assertion.

6. See [this essay's] next section, "ON THE COUNTERFORCE
CALCULATIONS OF SOME PROMINENT ABM OPPONENTS,"
for elaboration.

7. Poseidon and Minuteman III have been test flown and are in
the process of deployment (the first of these should be operational
in about a year and a half).

8. This section is a slightly edited version of a May 23, 1969,
supplement to my April 23, 1969, Statement to the Senate Armed
Services Committee.

9. See endnote 7 above.

411

10. Testimony of April 23, 1969, before the Senate Armed
Services Committee. See also Wohlstetter testimony of March
28, 1969, Part 1, p. 359, of Strategic and Foreign Policy Implications
of ABM Systems, Hearings before a subcommittee of the Senate
Committee on Foreign Relations.

11. It is an error that is repeated also in Abram Chayes and
Jerome B. Wiesner, eds., ABM: An Evaluation of ike Decision to
Deploy an Anti-ballistic Missile System, New York: Harper & Row,
1969.

12. CEP is the acronym for "Circular Error, Probable," a
commonly used measure of the inaccuracy of weapon systems. In
repeated firings, 50% of the weapons would miss their targets by
less than the CEP (or median miss distance) and 50% would miss
by more than the CEP. A frequent misinterpretation assumes that
all weapons miss their targets by a distance equal to the CEP —
which is like assuming that all students score at the 50th percentile
on an exam. A nautical mile is 6,080 feet. It, rather than a statute
mile, is a standard dimension for measuring CEP or median miss
distance.

13. Ralph E. Lapp, "From Nike to Safeguard: A Biography of
the ABM," The New York Times Magazine, May 4, 1969.

14. Chayes and Wiesner, eds., op. cit., pp. 86-93.

15. Johan Hoist and William Schneider added the following
commentary in 1969: Professor Wohlstetter's critique is based
upon the manuscript version of the book which was distributed
prior to its publication. In book form. Dr. Wiesner replaced the
explicit .8 kill probability with a vague reference to an "accuracy
estimated by Secretary Laird." In the manuscript, he incorrectly
calculated (on the basis of a .8 kill probability) that 270 missiles
would survive (the correct number is less than 150). The book
version retains the "conclusion" of 270 survivors but does not
make any explicit probability assumption — and thus now assumes
a kill probability of about .65. See Chayes and Wiesner, eds., op.
cit., p. 73.

412

16. I.e., my testimony on April 23, 1969.

17. Albert J. Wohlstetter and F. S. Hoffman, Protecting U.S.
Power to Strike Back in the 1950's and 1960's, R-290, Santa Monica,
CA: The RAND Corporation, September 1, 1956.

413

Racing Forward? Or Ambling Back? (1976)
Albert Wohlstetter^

From Defending America, New York: Basic Books, 1977,
pp. 110-168. Copyright © 1977 Institute for Contempo-
rary Studies. Reprinted by permission of Basic Books, a
member of the Perseus Books Group.

Not long ago the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which since
1945 has kept time on the arms race, moved its famous clock
ominously closer to midnight. The familiar reasoning is that
American and Soviet negotiators at Geneva have failed to reach
agreement on limiting strategic arms and so the race continues.
The United States has forced the pace by overestimating the
Soviet threat, and then, to play safe, spends more resources than
are needed to meet even a menace so inflated. In this way we
have given the U.S.S.R. no alternative than to react by spending
in its own self-defense — which, in turn, we meet by still more
"worst case" analyses, increased spending, and so on and on in
the deadly "action-reaction cycle." The superpowers are engaged
in a mortal contest, each provoking the other into piling up arms
endlessly, wasting scarce resources, increasing the indiscriminate
destructiveness of weapons, lessening rather than adding to their
security, and moving the world closer to nuclear holocaust.

Secretary of State Kissinger has recently adopted one variant
of this reasoning that puts the blame on technology. He has said
that military technology has developed a momentum of its own, is
at odds with the human capacity to comprehend it, is simply out
of control, or is in imminent danger of getting beyond political
control. Thus we must restrain not only the number of arms but
their qualitative improvement. For it seems that the very effort
to design new and better techniques to protect ourselves against
adversaries makes things worse for both sides and mankind.

All this is familiar, but is it true? Is it true, for example, that
we chronically overestimate what the Russians will deploy and
that this is the source of an "action-reaction" chain, driving the
Russians and ultimately ourselves to disaster? Whatever is the
case for the Soviet strategic budgets and forces, has the United
States in any clear sense been racing at all? Is it true, as is claimed,
that U.S. technical innovation, in particular, has spurred us to

414

higher and higher levels of strategic spending, destructiveness,
and instability?

In fact, none of this is true. Starting in the early 1960s, we
systematically underestimated how much and how rapidly the
Soviets would increase their strategic offense forces. Moreover,
for an even longer time, our own spending on strategic forces
has been "spiraling" down rather than up. U.S. strategic program
budgets ("Program I" as it is called) in real terms fell from a
plateau at the end of the 1950s that was three and a half times the
present size. In fact, the peak in strategic spending occurred in
fiscal year 1952 when the budget was about 4.25 times the fiscal
1976 level (in 1976 U.S. dollars the strategic program budget in
FY52 was 32.6 billion compared to 7.7 billion in FY76). Finally,
the net effect of major innovations in our strategic force since the
1950s was to reduce not only its cost but also its indiscriminate
destructiveness, and its instability or vulnerability to attack. These
actualities seem to contrast so sharply with the standard saying
about Soviet- American competition that we need:

First, to recall and document what the stereotypes about
the strategic arms race have been;

Second, to contrast the standard view that we chroni-
cally overestimate Soviet offense deployments with the
facts about what Soviet offense forces we predicted in
the 1960s and how these predictions turned out;

Third, to contrast the theory that our strategic spending
has been going up with the actual declining costs;

Fourth, to consider briefly the concrete effects of qualita-
tive improvements on U.S. strategic forces and budgets.

Finally, to ask how we could have been repeating ob-
vious untruths for so long without embarrassment. An-
swers to this last question must necessarily be specula-
tive. I'll suggest some as I go along.

415

The Standard View of the "Arms Race"

Contemporary stereotypes about the strategic arms race
resemble the arms-race doctrines of Lord Grey, Bertrand Russell,
Lewis Fry Richardson, and other doctrines that flourished in
England between two world wars and can be traced back at least to
Cobden in the mid-nineteenth century. These doctrines suggested
that each side in an arms race sees as a threat an increase in arms
by the other side that is intended merely for defense. Lord Grey,
who had been Foreign Minister when the Great War broke out,
wrote:

The increase of armaments, that is intended in each na-
tion to produce consciousness of strength, and a sense of
security, does not produce these effects. On the contrary,
it produces a consciousness of the strength of other na-
tions and a sense of fear. . . . The enormous growth of arma-
ments in Europe, the sense of insecurity and fear caused
by them — it was these that made war inevitable.

, 2

The Quaker physicist, Richardson, put such views into differential
equations relating the rate of increase in defense budgets, on
one side, to the level of spending on the other with a resulting
exponential increase of budgets for both.

The doctrines of the strategic "race" that have prevailed for
more than 15 years add a few new twists to the old theory. First,
they talk not simply of an exaggerated fear about the intent of
an opponent in amassing armaments, but about exaggerated
estimates of the size of these armaments and about plans to
meet the opposing side's increase which would be overcautious
(assuming the "worst case") even if the estimates of the range of
possibilities were correct. Second, the British theorists between the
wars adopted a certain Olympian even-handedness in describing
the reciprocal fears generating the race. (Richardson talks of the
mistaken fear of the "Minister of Jedesland [every country].") But
current American doctrines, like revisionist history, frequently
place on America the main responsibility for the rate and scale of
the arms race. Third, the current doctrines stress the instabilities
brought about by technology. And fourth, they locate the source
of the race especially in efforts to defend civilians and destroy

416

offensive military forces, and see the force driving the quantitative
spiral to be not merely qualitative military change, but, in
particular, improved technologies for destroying not people but
weapons, whether in place or already on their way to target. This
perverse doctrine, widely prevalent among theorists of the arms
race since Sputnik, has been summarized by a sympathizer to the
view in the "frosty apothegm": "Killing people is good; killing
weapons is bad."^

Arms race dogma about "runaway technology," "exaggerated
threats," "worst case analysis," "explosive increases," "uncapped
volcanoes," "action-reaction," "treadmill to nowhere," etc., so
pervades the statements on SALT and strategic interaction by
Cabinet members. Congress and its staff, public interest lobbies,
the academics, and the news media, that selecting a few out of a
mass of citations may seem redundant; it risks bruising individual
sensibilities.

But as Leon Festinger, a student of apocalyptic prophecies,
reminds us, prophets and their disciples often deny they meant
what they said, or even that they said it. So also, the apocalyptic
prophets of the race to nuclear oblivion, when confronted with an
empirical test and refutation of their beliefs: they have responded
by denying that they or anyone else hold the dogma.* Here then is
a sample of views documenting the points challenged.

Take the exaggerated threat "worst case" dynamic. In its
more moderate form, this dogma holds that our planners have a
systematic bias towards exaggerating — expecting our adversary
to do more than he does — and that they compound this error by
designing our force to meet a force greater than we expect — a
"worst plausible case." It is this minimal form I show to be in
error, not only the more obviously wrong extreme that talks of
"invariable overestimation" or "worst possible case."

Morton Halperin and Jeremy Stone, as if arguments can
be directed only at the extreme, say the notion that "arms race
analysts believe in a myth of invariable U.S. overestimation" is a
"straw man." It is "obviously unlikely," they say, that "analysts
believe anything is invariable." They want quotations.

For the extreme, one can introduce the flesh and blood Jeremy
Stone to the straw Jeremy Stone, who has written:

The department invariably exaggerates the Soviet threat
to obtain public and congressional support for weapons
that will undermine the Soviet deterrent.^

417

And less or equally extreme:

Jerome Wiesner — We always underestimate our own
capabilities and overestimate those of the other fellow/

Leonard Rodberg — Even though the Soviets invariably
lag far behind these predictions, our own programs go
forward as if the forecasts were accurate.../

Herbert Scoville — We should not again fall into the trap
of perennial, compulsive reaction to timeworn exagger-
ated threats.*

Leslie Gelb — The common practice, as I think we all
know, has been to exaggerate and overdramatize.'

Robert McNamara— ...a strategic planner must be "con-
servative" in his calculations; that is, he must prepare for
the worst plausible case.^"

Stanley Hoffmann — The whole history of the postwar
arms race is one of... preemptive escalation based on a
worst case hypothesis which assumes the adversary's
capacity and will to go ahead full speed."

Paul Warnke— ... in determining relative strategic bal-
ance, the other side, just as we do, must use worst case
analysis.... They are not going to overestimate their po-
tential and underestimate ours. If any, the error will be
in the other direction. ^^

Such a belief is distinct from, but frequently associated with, a
view that the United States is the catalyst for the race. Halperin
and Stone observe sagely that the two views are distinct, but seem
to doubt the currency of the second view as well. We might begin
the list once more with a characteristically temperate quote from
Stone:

The Department of Defense has become an inventor and
a merchandiser of exaggerated fears ... an unscrupulous
lobbyist to get the weapons to answer these fears. Worst

418

of all, through the action-and-reaction phenomenon, its
aggressive pursuit of the arms race has greatly under-
mined the security of the nation by unnecessarily stimu-
lating Soviet efforts to keep up."

Edgar Bottome — It is my contention that with minor ex-
ceptions, the United States had led in the development of
military technology and weapons production through-
out the Cold War.... The Soviet Union has been placed
in a position where all it could do was react to American
initiatives in bomber or missile building programs. This
American superiority, along with the highly ambitious
nature of American foreign policy, has placed the United
States in a position of being fundamentally responsible
for every major escalation of the arms race.^*

William Epstein — American scientists seem to have the
edge in technology and to lead the way in developing
new weapons, particularly in the nuclear field, but So-
viet scientists follow close behind in the action-reaction
chain. ^^

Bernard Feld — History guarantees that new American
technology will certainly be followed ... by Soviet emula-
tion."

Marshall Shulman — This commitment ... has led us to
force the pace of the strategic arms race, and it inescap-
ably leads to an uncontrolled military competition with
the Soviet Union. ^^

John Newhouse — America's forces apparently served
as both model and catalyst for the Russians.... Such is
the action-reaction cycle as perceived by many scientists
and bureaucrats."

Newhouse adds that other scientists argue, "It is the impulse
of technology, not an action-reaction cycle, that drives the arms
race...." Most scientists in my collection see the impulse coming
from us and technology. So, to quote Rodberg, "...we have used
our own superior technology to drive the arms race forward."^'
But the malign role of technology is particularly important in the

419

dogma and deserves illustration. "Is Jerome Wiesner," Michael
Nacht has demanded, choosing an evidently far-fetched case, "a
modern-day Luddite?" Consider the following from a committee
Wiesner headed:

It is, after all the continuing competition to perfect and de-
ploy new armaments that absorbs quantities of time, en-
ergy, and resources that no static environment would
demand; that exacerbates U.S. and Soviet relations with
unreal considerations of strategic advantage or disad-
vantage; that keeps political leaders in both great pow-
ers off-balance and ill-prepared for far-reaching agree-
ments; that fixes the attention of both sides on the most
threatening aspects of the opposing posture; and, espe-
cially, that provides heightened risks of a violent spasm
of procurement — one spurring to new levels the cost, distrust,
and the explosive dangers of an unending competition in arms
(italics added). ^°

The explosive dangers feared, Wiesner makes clear elsewhere,
involve "an ever-increasing likelihood of war so disastrous that
civilization, if not man himself, will be eradicated. "^^ Anyone who
holds that military innovation has a. net bad effect (my definition
of a Luddite in the military field) — let alone the effect of ultimate
catastrophe — should want to impose general restraints on it. So,
to quote Herbert York:

The recent small successes in controlling the quantita-
tive side of the arms race also call for renewed efforts
to control its qualitative side, to slow down the rate of
weapons innovation, and hence to reduce the frequency
of introduction of ever more complex and threatening
weapons. ^^

Examples could be multiplied. But we need not leave
Cambridge, Massachusetts. Consider George Kistiakowsky and
George Rathjens:

... any understanding that slowed the rate of develop-
ment and change of strategic systems would have an ef-
fect in the right direction.^^

420

And take Harvey Brooks, who argues that "the most promising
lines of action for controlling the qualitative arms race probably lie
in mutually agreed limitations on testing," but also suggests agree-
ments to forgo specific improvements and general declarations
against destabilizing developments, even if both would be hard
to interpret or verify — particularly "in closed societies."^* Even
unverifiable agreements would provide arguments in internal
bureaucratic debate to those who oppose such developments — at
least in open societies. Or take Paul Doty:

... even better would be the adoption of a generalized
set of restraints that would slow the whole development
and deployment process. ^^

These would have an effect in the right direction, if qualitative
change has a net bias toward making strategic forces more costly,
more indiscriminately destructive, more vulnerable, and harder to
control. But if not, you wouldn't slow things down generally. Nor
try merely to stop "unfavorable" developments (always a good
idea). You would encourage the development with all deliberate
speed of technologies that reduce costs, increase discrimination,
and make forces less vulnerable and easier to control.

I will present evidence that, whatever the false starts and
mistakes in detail, the net effects of our major technological
choices from the 1950s to the present were exactly the reverse of
the Luddite stereotype. Generalized restraints would have been a
bad idea.

U.S. Predictions and Soviet Realities

Systematic or even invariable overestimation need not lead
to an arms spiral. If one's aim to counter a given threat is made
extremely costly by expected adversary moves, because the
threat is very large and the advantage is all on the other side, the
game may not be worth the candle. This was in fact Secretary
McNamara's chief argument against undertaking a thick ABM
defense against the Soviets. In short, the larger the threat, the
more futile a response may seem. The logic that overestimating an
adversary drives one to race him is not compelling. Nonetheless,
it is important to ask whether the U.S. government has in

421

fact systematically overestimated Soviet missile and bomber
deployments — an assertion central to the dogma of a spiral driven
by exaggerated estimates and mistaken fear.

The "missile gap," as is well known, was a U.S. overestimate
after Sputnik of the number of intercontinental ballistic missile
(ICBM) launchers that the Russians would deploy in the early
1960s. Indeed, the trauma of discovering the error formed the basis
of many of Mr. McNamara's generalizations about our tendency
to exaggerate and then to respond to anticipated larger threats
rather than to what the Soviet leaders actually turned out to do.
The missile gap has also generated a substantial confessional
literature on the part of current proponents of the doctrine of an
explosive arms race about their own role in creating the myth of
the missile gap, and a substantial academic industry in doctoral
theses and articles explaining this particular overestimate and the
supposedly general and plainly evil habit of overestimating. A
few comments, therefore, are in order on the missile gap before
making a broader test of the habit. (Perhaps it is worth saying
that I am on record, before and after Sputnik, as having steadily
opposed evaluating force effectiveness on the basis of bomber or
missile gaps.)

First, the "missile gap," a brief period in which the Soviets
were expected to but did not deploy ICBMs more rapidly than we
did, was an ICBM gap rather than a general missile gap. During the
same period, in fact, we regularly and greatly underestimated the
number of intermediate and medium range ballistic missile (IRBM/
MRBM) launchers that the Russians would deploy at the end of
the 1950s and in the early 1960s. For example, our underestimate
of the number of IRBM and MRBM launchers that the Russians
would deploy by 1963 roughly offset our overestimate of the
number of ICBM launchers they would deploy. In short, we
misunderstood or reversed the priorities the Russians assigned
to getting capabilities against the European as distinct from the
North American part of NATO. This piece of ethnocentrism
on our part was characteristic. We also greatly underestimated
Soviet aircraft systems directed primarily at Europe rather than
ourselves.

Second, predicting the size and exact mixture of a potential
adversary's weapon deployments several years hence is a
hard line of work. It is intrinsically uncertain, reversible by the
adversary himself between the time of prediction and the actual
deployment. Moreover, an adversary may want his opponent to

422

estimate wrongly, either up or down. In the specific case of the
missile gap, Khrushchev did what he could to make the U.S. and
the rest of the world believe that the Soviets had a larger initial
program of ICBMs than they actually had; and he succeeded.

Whatever the source and nature of our misestimation, it
helped generate the belief that we invariably expect the Russian
programs to be larger than they turn out to be, that we compound
this overestimate by deliberately designing our programs to meet
a Russian threat that is greater even than the one we expect, and
then, when the Russian threat turns out to be less rather than
greater than expected, the damage is done; the overlarge U.S.
force is already a reality or irreversibly committed.

It is a good idea, then, to subject to systematic test this
claim of regular overestimation. It is a major element of the
current dogma, repeated endlessly since 1961. In fact, the nearly
universal acceptance of this belief has emerged from constant
repetition of tags like "the mad momentum," "we have invariably
overestimated" or "we are running a race with ourselves," etc.,
rather than from any systematic numerical comparison with
reality.^'' Figures 1 to 3 sum up^^ the results of a search for all of
the long-term predictions of Soviet strategic missile and bomber
deployment that could be found in the annual presentation of
programs and budgets to Congress by the Secretary of Defense
from the start of 1962 to the start of 1972, and a comparison of
these predictions with what the Russians actually deployed by
mid-1972 — the last date referred to in the predictions that could
be checked at the time the analysis was completed.

Aside from their comparative accessibility, several reasons
governed the choice of these predictions from the Defense
Secretaries' formal statements, rather than from Army, Navy,
Air Force, CIA, Bureau of Intelligence Research in State, or other
estimates.

First, during this extended period the Secretary of Defense
did, regularly, every year, make predictions precise enough
to be proved wrong and precise enough for measuring how
much they had missed the mark. The possibility of determining
error here requires not only that the predictions be specific as
to time and quantity, and not excessively hedged by "might"
or "may conceivably," but also that the adversary realities
referred to in the predictions be open to observation and highly
reliable measurement by the U.S. after the fact. Not all objects
nor all characteristics predicted nor all predictors meet these
requirements. Far from it.

423

Second, these predictions of the Secretary of Defense form a
well-defined, substantial population of estimates — which is not
the case for intelligence predictions in general.

Third, these estimates were presented as authoritative and
official.

Fourth, they were given particular prominence in the
programming and budgeting process by the fact that the Secretary
used them directly to support his program. And finally these
particular forecasts relate directly to the Secretary's judgment and
that of the Congress on the five-year defense program. They are
therefore most relevant for analyzing possible relations between
defense programs and defense budgets and the impetus these
programs might be given by forecasts as to the future enemy
force deployments. Defense systems take many years to become
operational, and the forces they will confront are necessarily the
subject only of long-term conjecture. In presenting these estimates
the Secretary emphasized this point. For example, in 1963 he
testified:

Because of the long leadtimes involved in making these
weapon systems operational, we must plan for our forces
well in advance of the time when we will need them and,
indeed, we now project our programs at least five years
ahead of the current budget year. For the same reason
we must also project our estimates of the enemy's forces
at least five years into the future, and for some purposes,
even beyond. These longer range projections of enemy
capabilities are, of course, highly conjectural, particular-
ly since they deal with a period beyond the production
and deployment lead-times of enemy weapon systems.
Therefore, we are, in effect, attempting to anticipate pro-
duction and deployment decisions which our opponents,
themselves, may not yet have made. This fact should be
borne in mind as we discuss the intelligence estimates
and our own programs based on them.^^

The first eight charts. Figures la to Ih, compare U.S.
predictions of Soviet ICBM launchers to be deployed with the
actuality as estimated after the fact.^' The vertical arrows indicate
the date at which the prediction was made (e.g., February 1962 in
Figure la). The dashed line or lines indicate the range from high
to low of what was predicted (in Figure la, a high of 650 and a low

424

of 350, by inid-1967, five and a half years later). Later projections
usually included (as in Figure lb) a high and a low for more than
one year. This is shown in the shaded portion. The steeply rising
solid line which is the same in all the charts shows the number the
Russians actually completed, as estimated after the fact.

Though the claim about invariable overestimation posits that
at least the middle of the range between high and low always
exceeds the reality, it will be apparent that even the high end of the
range seldom did that, and then only at the start of the period — and
even then just barely. For ICBMs the "highs" reached as high as
reality only twice in 11 times. The prediction made in 1965 (Figure
Id) is typical. Figures 2 and 3 illustrate analogously typical long-
run predictions of future Soviet submarine-launched missiles
deployed and future Soviet bomber deployments. The middle
of the predicted range of the number of sub-launched missiles
deployed was about three-quarters of the eventual reality. In the
case of the bombers, we continued to believe that the Russians
were going to phase them down and most drastically in the case
of the medium bombers; but the Soviets never came down to our
expectations. Tables 1 and 2 sum up some principal results. Out
of 51 predictions, the low end of the range never exceeded the
actual; the mean between the high and low exceeded it only twice
in 51 times; our highs reached reality only nine times! Hardly a
record of overestimation. Moreover, the ratios of projected-to-
realized future values of the Soviet strategic force in operation
display the fact that the underestimates were very substantial and
that even the average of the highs was under the reality. It will be
evident also that there was no systematic learning from the past
as information accumulated.

In fact, since the numbers shown refer to estimates of the
cumulative number of strategic vehicles in operation at future
dates, and since the later predictions were based on much more
extensive knowledge of what was already deployed or at least
started in construction at the time of the prediction, the degree of
bias can be made even plainer. There are several points.

425

ICSMs

Sub-tauDched
Missiles

Heavy
Bombers

Medium

Bomben

Total

D <^ It

of IJ

of 14

Oof 11

Oof 51

Oof 11

1 of 15

1 of 14

of 11

2 of 51

2 Ot 11

3 of IS

2 of 14

2 of It

9 of 51

Z«wer Predictions

0-53

064

(frlfi)

(0-12)

Mid-Range of

OCT

0-74

Pndictioits

((>33>

(0-47)

Bigh Predictions

0-80

0-S4

(0-50)

(0-82)

Table 1

1962-1971 U.S. Predictions that Exceed the Actual

Soviet Strategic Deployment *

Low Predictions that
exceed Actual

Mid-Range of Predictions

that exceed Actual
High Predielions that

exceed Actual

Table 2

Average Ratios of Predicted-to-Aaual Cumulative Numbers •
(Numbers in parentheses compare predicted to actual change)

Sub-launched Heavy Medium

ICBMs Misuleei Boiuben Bombers

(11 Estimate) (15 Bsttmat^) (14 Estimates) (11 Estimates)

wis cw

Ml 0-77

0-S8 0-87

* Pradictloas eKclude short-teno estimates of ICBMj aui! sub-Uunchcd mteHes tbsl
aiB limited essentially (o compleliDa of Uuncbtrs slreidy staled.

First, our means of acquiring information improved greatly
over the period. Second, in the later years a much larger pro-
portion of the cumulative total in operation was already in
operation at the time predictions were made. And third, we had
information not only about the number of launchers completed
and in operation (displayed in the rising curves of Soviet ICBM
and SLBM launchers) but also about the substantial numbers of
launchers that had been started but not completed at the time
the prediction was made. We knew that ICBMs started would
generally be completed, say, in about a year and a half, and
submarine-based missile launchers in about two and a half years,
but in any case well before the dates in our long-run predictions.
In fact, estimates of the missile launchers already started that
were expected to be completed by a given time were, at the
midrange, only 3 percent below the actual number for ICBMs and
2 percent above it for submarine-launched missiles. If we make a
rough adjustment for this fact on the one hand and on the other
allow for some delay in acquiring and processing information
by the date predictions were made, if we assume generously a
seven-month delay, the degree of understatement will be more
apparent. In effect, what was being predicted was an increment in

426

the force then in operation or under construction. It is appropriate
to compare that increment with the actual amount newly started
and completed in the ensuing interval.

ICSU PndldkBa hb^ la HO

i I I I I I I I t I I I

ha dkila iM ie Ptpuv la-lb i

ICBM Prcdielions Made in 1965

*"/

Lf"

pmJicled by ihe US

Date piedklions

/ ,''v5'~

1 ! \ L_

_! i 1 1 ; 1 i— J

I-SJU

1600

1400

1200

1000

1 soo

■s

^ ^

/ ^f'"'

Range of

„ 600

/ y

deployments

Dale predictions

by the US

1 400

1 '^^'-'"^

O 200

1 1

1 — 1 — \ — 1 — 1

1 1 1

62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73
Calendar Year

427

K7U rtwiH^aa UA !■ lUfi

ing»

QCJMdi«CTtt«7a7in7;i

Figure Ig
ICBM Piediction Made ii

Figure th
ICBM PredictioQ Made in 1969

J LJ 1 1 1 L-J I I 1_J

63 64 65 « 67 68 69 70 71 72 73
Calendar Year

S 400 -
O" 200 -

I I I I t I I I 1 I I

62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73
Calendar Year

428

IKS IS Leaa tdB mdlal« Ce«V<i<Dd b? khe Aduat hahtf ■

]9H US PrEd£Oai C^piMd to Ik A.

1 »

J. J I I i_

Burying Wrong Predictions in the Known Past

Our longer-term predictions about the Soviet strategic triad
were under the mark for 11 years. The long-term ICBM projections
presented in Figures la-lh were made during the eight years
from 1962 to 1969. (Later ones referred to dates well after SALT I
numerical limits on missiles took effect.) Did these eight years of
long-range ICBM predictions show systematic learning?

It would not be surprising if they did, or even if, after
eight years of trying, ICBM predictions finally touched reality.
Programs do, in the end, level off; and the forecaster who year
after year predicts they will, sooner or later, like a stopped watch,
will be right. What is surprising is that these forecasts got worse,
not better.

Some analysts now grant that we underestimated, but
claim that we improved with time.^" They ignore the important
difference between predicting a cumulative total of vehicles that
will have been deployed at some future time, most of which
are known to be already completed or in process at the time
when the prediction is made, and predicting a change from this
known state. This accurately-known past makes up an increasing
portion of the cumulative total. Nonetheless, those who detect an
improvement in forecasts compare predicted with actual totals,
not predicted with actual change from what was known; and so
swamp unpredicted new starts in the steadily increasing total of
launchers known to be started or completed.

429

Suppose every year a forecaster regularly predicted that
during the next 12 months an adversary was going to add 10 more
missile launchers; and every year, without fail, the adversary
added 100. At the end of 10 years, the adversary would have
built up a force of 1,000 launchers. But in the beginning of the
tenth year, with 900 in place, the forecaster, undaunted, might
predict, once more, that in the next period the adversary would
build only 10 more, so reaching a cumulative total of 910. If one
used Nacht's ratio of the predicted-to-actual cumulative number
deployed, it would appear that the forecaster's skill in prediction
was steadily improving. In the first year the predicted-to-actual
ratio was 10/100, in the second year 110/200 — and so on until the
great success of the tenth year, when the predicted-to-actual ratio
would be 910/1,000. A success ratio of 0.91 seems a marvelous
improvement over 0.10. However, year after year he would have
been undershooting reality in the same way. The difference between
the predicted and actual cumulative numbers would have been the
same — namely 90 — and the ratio of predicted-to-actual increments
would have continued to be one-tenth. The forecaster would have
learned nothing about how better to anticipate the future. The
cumulative ratios, as in Figure 4a, miss this essential point.

Ratln of rtidicud u> Acutl Oumiliiivt Toub d Sarin [CBM
Silai {BuTYifLf Uu Futuze Jo llic Known PBd) *

I'Z -

-m -

M-

J L.

J i

CUendAT year who] pndktten w>3 msdo

430

Moving from hypothetical to actual history, if we exercise a
little care, it is easy to see that our long-run predictions of net
future change were getting no better, that if anything they were
worsening. The most direct way to establish that fact is suggested
by our hypothetical example, where the difference between
prediction and reality remains constant while the cumulative
ratios suggest an apparent improvement.

Figure 4a^^ presents a scatter diagram that buries errors about
the future in statements that are mostly about the known past. It
shows ratios of predicted-to-actual cumulative totals of finished
silos. The Secretaries made these long-term predictions during
the eight-year period 1962 to 1969. All refer to dates no later
than mid-1972. Each dot represents one such cumulative ratio
calculated at the mid-range of each prediction. In each of three of
the years, the Secretaries made two long-range predictions. I have
connected the subset of eight dots that maximize the impression
that the worsening was reversed. ^^

RdSm Af Pndcad u AfmiJ taefhiti in Sot
(Ad}aa^ fai SBtn Caiifikud « ft fnetiM W.

II «

In the more appropriate Figure 4b each dot represents the
mean amount per year by which the mid-range between high
and low of a long-term prediction missed reality. All of the dots
throughout the entire period are below zero. All undershoot
reality. The average difference between predicted and actual silos
was -80.1. Second, the dots drift downward quite steeply; that
is, the underestimates tended to get much worse year by year. A
trend line fitted in the standard way to the points representing

431

underestimates slopes downward at the rate of -12.59 silos
per year. For the period as a whole the evidence indicates not
"learning," but "unlearning." During the later subperiod starting
in 1965 (the year some analysts think of as the worst), tests do
not show improvement: there is no statistically significant trend
towards reducing the differences between predicted and actual.
A variety of statistical tests indicates worsening. ^^ Moreover
Figure 4b still neglects knowledge of launchers in process. On
the whole, then, the evidence provided by a study of differences
between predicted and actual numbers of silos suggests both
underestimation and increasing underestimation.

That evidence can be greatly reinforced by a closer look at
ratios, provided however that one looks at ratios of predicted-to-
actual changes from the accurately known past. At the time when
predictions were being made, the forecaster had hard data not
only on (a) silos completed at that time, but also on (b) those that
were in process of construction. Figure 4c presents ratios adjusted
both for silos completed and for those in process of construction.
Since the predicted numbers were less than the actual numbers, the
ratios are all less than one; all are underestimates. The predictions
averaged roughly a third of the actual number. The median ratio
is .34. The ratios drift downward with time, worsening at a rate of
about eight percentage points a year.

In sum, the long-term U.S. projections of Soviet ICBM silos were
not only underestimates, but also deteriorating underestimates.
The phenomenon cries out for explanation.

The distinction between predicting cumulative totals and
predicting changes in these totals may explain not only recent
errors in analyzing history; it may also be part of the explanation
for the slowness of the forecasters themselves to recognize a drift
away from reality while it was happening. For even though the
use of cumulative totals of finished launchers (and especially of
ratios of predicted-to-actual totals) has its hazards in an analysis
of the success of predictions, such totals have an obvious current
operational importance for those who are charged with planning
for the contingency of combat. Adversaries must fight with the
stocks they have ready at the time a war breaks out. "Orders of
battle" are given in terms of such total stocks. For many current
purposes, therefore, it is entirely natural to formulate predictions
in such terms.

Nonetheless, when predictions are formulated mainly in
this way — as they are — systematic forecasting errors will tend

432

to be buried in the larger totals, and corrections are likely to be
discovered later than if forecasts were made in terms of the changes
expected during the prediction interval. Someone planning to
buy additional forces or to phase some out, should focus on long-
term changes in adversary forces. Failure to center on change is
only part of the explanation. Much remains to be explained. But
underestimation of bomber and missile deployments for a very
long time plainly persisted. That is the main point

So far I have focused on the important set of predictions cited
by the Secretaries of Defense. While these plainly played a key role
in the planning and budgeting process, one might well ask whether
they were typical of the intelligence community. Those reluctant
to give up the myth of chronic overestimation in particular ask
this question, and have in mind the official consensus and, even
more, the widely reported excesses of the Air Force. In fact it is
familiar that during the "missile gap" Army and Navy estimates
were under, and the Air Force over, the consensus. To judge how
widespread underestimation became during the 1960s, it is worth
comparing Air Force long-range ICBM predictions with the official
consensus starting in the autumn of 1961, and comparing both
with the Soviet realities counted in post-deployment estimates.

The Air Force, the Consensus, and Reality

In the first two years (Figures 5a and 5b), the Air Force did
indeed exceed both the consensus and the reality. In autumn
1962 the mid-range of the consensus was below the 1967 reality
and the "high" barely reached it. In autumn 1963, the Air Force
predictions still greatly exceeded the consensus, but the two
began to converge. There was some overlap between them in the
early years referred to in the prediction, and in the more distant
years, when the Air Force outbid the consensus, even its high
dropped below reality. In autumn 1964 the Air Force and official
predictions came close together and overlapped for the first
time in predictions about the more distant years. For these more
distant years, even the Air Force highs were below reality, though
the Air Force still exceeded the consensus. In autumn 1965 and
1966 (Figures 5e and 5f) underestimation worsened with further
convergence. Finally, in autumn 1967, convergence was total. The
Air Force endorsed the consensus on condition that the Soviets
would deploy MRVs (Multiple Re-entry Vehicles — unlike MIRVs,
not aimed independently), which they did. The highs of the long-

433

term forecasts in these last years till mid-1967 were invariably
under reality, and both the consensus and the Air Force assumed
an ultimate leveling off of the Russian program well below what
happened. In autumn 1968 the Air Force concurred with the
consensus on the assumption, now clearly conservative, that
MIRVs would be deployed by mid-1978.

Air Ttno 1^ DBcU i

NkKUB&rYor

MUCtfqiiderYnr

Md-QiBdirYar

434

All Fotu ud DflkU C

' I

uauuttTaTz-HfTtTt

HhtCklnlir Yw

^JtoWBdOUttOB

The steady movement towards the official forecasts suggests the
power of consensus. That power is particularly impressive since
final convergence occurred in autumn 1967, which (as McNamara
observed the following January) marked a 380-silo jump from
autumn 1966. Deviation from the consensus on the high side went
out of style just as it became objectively most plausible.

435

Why?

Pressures for conformity in the 1960s tended to operate against
overestimating offense deployment. Overestimating rather than
error had become disreputable. For example, the Secretary, in
January 1964, stressed that "these longer-range projections of
enemy capabilities must necessarily be highly uncertain," but,
"indeed the record shows that in the last several years we have
consistently overestimated Soviet ICBM strength" (italics added).
He then cited three forecasts made in 1959, 1960, and 1961, during
the "missile gap," about Soviet ICBMs expected in mid-1963. All
three, of course, were far above the mark. He warned, "These
facts should be borne in mind as we discuss the estimates for the
1967-69 period." But the 1964 estimate about 1967, to which he
attached this caveat, turned out to be not above but way below
the mark — 120 silos below at mid-range. Moreover, while in the
preceding two years predictions about 1967 were also below, the
1964 prediction was worse. And the 1965 prediction about 1967
was worse still. As 1967 got closer, our aim at it sank steadily
further beneath the bull's eye.

Part of the pressure to conform by underestimating was very
likely a reflex, over-correcting for the "missile gap" that had
publicly embarrassed the intelligence community. But this could
hardly explain the extraordinary persistence and even worsening
of the errors, as evidence to the contrary began to pour in. It is
interesting that the Secretary brought up the "missile gap" in 1964
to reinforce his caveat against overestimation. The "gap" had been
given public burial in the autumn of 1961. The Defense Report had
not bothered to mention it in 1962 or 1963. The Report revived the
horrible example as part of the budget battle and issued ominous
strictures against exaggeration as a way of cutting the ground
from under importunate service demands based on anticipated
large Soviet capabilities.

As for Soviet "capabilities," when the Secretary used that
phrase, or "Soviet ICBM strength," as in the passage quoted,
he referred explicitly to the number of vehicles deployed. These
numbers are what the forecasts were overwhelmingly about, just
as the forecasts during the "missile gap" had been. It was only
when the number of Soviet silos completed or in process came
close to catching up with the ceiling we had chosen for our ICBM
force that the Secretary began to put some stress on "qualitative

436

superiority." In effect, he asserted by way of comfort, the Soviets
may get nearly as many missiles, but ours will be better. But his FY
1968 Report insisted that especially if we counted in the SLBMs,
we were still ahead even in numbers — "as of now." "As of now,
we have more than three times the number of intercontinental
ballistic missiles (i.e., ICBMs and SLBMs) the Soviets have. Even
by the early 1970s, we still expect to have a significant lead over the
Soviet Union in terms of numbers... and," the Secretary added, in
a vague but dazzling phrase, able to comfort even today, "a very
substantial superiority in terms of overall combat effectiveness."

But in 1971, the Soviets had the lead in numbers. Looking on
the bright side — "quality" — may have dazzled perceptions of our
failure to predict the numerical shift. The Defense Reports in fact
contain a treasure trove of methods of bucking us up while blurring
our view. Their very vagueness soothes. "By and large," said the
Secretary in 1965, "the current estimates. . . projected through mid-
1970 are of the same order of magnitude as [last year's] projections
through mid-1969." And in 1966, with reassuring familiarity: "By
and large the current estimates projected through mid-1970 are of
the same general order of magnitude as those which I discussed
here last year." In 1967, he reported that the current estimates were
"generally in line" with the preceding year. "Order of magnitude"
is particularly mind-boggling, but strictly implied only that this
year's estimates were within one-tenth to 10 times as much as last
year's. Which is less reassuring. In any case, the estimates were
wrong and getting worse.

In 1968, after the huge 380-silo jump in one year, McNamara
said, "We believe the Soviet ICBM force will continue to grow
over the next few years, but at a considerably slower rate than
in the recent past." But the rate specified fell far below the one
later observed. In 1969, Secretary Clifford continued in the same
cheery vein. The Soviet force has grown "well over threefold in
a ... little more than two years. The rate ... has been somewhat
greater than estimated a year ago. However, we believe [it] will be
considerably smaller over the next two or three years." But once
again the expected rate of new starts formed a small fraction of
the actual. Such muffled disappointments scarcely perturbed the
theory, pushed hard in 1969 and 1970, that exaggerations drove a
race.

It would be wrong, I think, to conclude that the Defense Re-
ports display a conscious effort to obscure our failure to anticipate
rapid Soviet increase. More likely, wishes and policy leanings

437

shaped — and lowered — consciousness. But much remains to be
explained. Undoubtedly, various leanings — some to expand,
some to cut or reallocate strategic spending — influenced estimates
of contending factions. But then we need to ask not only "cui bono
[to whose advantage]?" but which estimates matched reality.
Factions in or out of government have some compatible interests.
Aside from a joint interest in accurate assessment for the common
defense, all factions have at least an occupational self-interest in
not making forecasts that fail disastrously.

Underestimates persisted for an extraordinarily long time after
the error of the missile gap in part because they were fortified by
an American strategic view that Americans often attributed also
to the Soviets. (These were "projections" in the psychoanalyst's,
as well as the forecaster's sense.) That view suggested that the
Soviets did not need a large expansion of forces in order to be able
to destroy a few American cities and therefore did not intend to
undertake it.^''

It was common in and out of government through the mid-
1960s to hold that the Soviets wanted only a minimum deterrent,
a couple of hundred missiles aimed at cities (roughly the actual
number of Soviet ICBMs in 1964-65), and that they would not try
to catch up.^' We clung to this belief after they had started enough
launchers to make it untenable. Then we shifted to saying they
wanted only to catch up, just as they were passing us on the way
to getting 50 percent more. "Rough parity" can be quite rough.

Action-reaction language is vague enough to rationalize events
after the fact. It was a glass through which we saw darkly. It not
only led us to wrong predictions about the Soviet actions, but it
made inaction on our part seem reasonable. The Russians would
not act to catch up, because they knew we would react to counter
them, and since they would not act we did not have to. But in fact,
they acted and we did not. And sometimes the Secretary argued
that if we were to increase our active defense, the Russians would
inevitably react by vastly increasing their offense so that in the
end we would not only have wasted the money, but would end
up with a net increase in the number of fatalities we might suffer.
In other words, if we acted, the Russians would react; therefore
there was no point in taking action.

Unfortunately, a distorting and wishful myopia followed from
the close polemical focus of factions in and out of government on
the very latest incremental change in Soviet force dispositions and
its implications for the current year's U.S. budget, as compared

438

to that of the preceding year. Momentary pauses in Soviet
construction of launchers for one missile type, perhaps because
new improved systems were being readied for deployment or
because of bad weather, were seized on by outside advisers and
by unnamed "highly placed officials" as an indication that Soviet
programs were "tapering off," "leveling off," "slowing down,"
"petering out," "grinding to a halt."^' Since, characteristically,
massive Soviet efforts in research, development, testing, and
evaluation parallel a countercycle in deployment, and since
Russian weather is notoriously intemperate, especially during
their long winters when our budget debates start, there was plenty
of room for confusion, ambiguity, and self-deception inside and
outside the U.S. government.

As for the public view, it was only to be expected that
statements about increased Soviet missile deployments would
be dismissed with a kind of naive cynicism: the slickers in the
Pentagon are using their annual scare tactics in support of bigger
budgets. Some outside advisers protested the government's
"'most outrageous' statements about the alleged buildup by
Russia," whereas in fact we were told, "The Soviet arms capability
actually is tapering off." Dissonant sounds of reality were hardly
audible in Establishment study groups meeting in Washington,
Cambridge, and New York. The successful attempt to save the
predictions and the dogma on which they were based is quite
as instructive as the performance of Sabbatai Zevi's followers, a
sect that managed to survive and reinterpret a public prediction
that the world would end in 1648 and even to acquire new and
more enthusiastic adherents; or the Millerites who gathered new
followers after the world failed to end as Miller had predicted by
March 21, 1844.^^ Students of the subject have observed that when
predictions fail, this may only increase fervor and proselytizing
for the dogma that led to the prediction. After all, it is in just such
adversity that a dogma needs all the recruits it can get. Editorials
and articles appear with ritual regularity in The New York Times,
the New Republic, the Christian Science Monitor, Scientific American,
and elsewhere warning of the Pentagon's ritual exaggeration
of the threat and presenting in full-blown form a generalized
doctrine that it is just such exaggerations that accelerate the fatal
spiral.

Though holders of the dogma of regular U.S. overestimation
protested against excessive secrecy, they were in good part
protected by it. Exact quantitative comparisons of past predictions

439

with reality take time and would have met much resistance even
in private; in public a systematic, long-term check was impossible.
However, enough has long been public to undermine the theory
of regular overestimation. We have had open official statements
reflecting classified estimates that the Russians would not try
to get as many missiles as the U.S., that they were stopping or
slowing down; and equally public figures on the actual growth of
Russian strategic forces. The contrast was plain, or rather would
have been plain, if only we had been taking a long hard look;
or even looking. More important, the reality of understatement
should have destroyed the generalized theory of overstatement,
but it did not.

It would be unfortunate if we should now swing from
understatement to the opposite extreme. It would be nice, though
far from easy, to get it nearly right. Even if we do, the implications
for our strategic budgets will by no means be simple. Sober
consideration, however, will discount the threat that invariably
overestimating Soviet threats drives us to exponential increases
and the notion that only throwing caution to the winds can stop
the "race." The threat of invariable overestimation is one that is
plainly exaggerated.

Some of these policy decisions, I believe, were justified on other
grounds. But prevailing doctrine offered a generalized rationale
for cutting rather than expanding. That is what happened, but
we didn't notice. Our perceptions of actual U.S. past declines
have been as confused as our view of supposed future Soviet
increases.

Ill

Mythical U.S. Increases and Actual U.S. Declines

Whatever the explanation offered for the strategic race —
invariably overestimating and worst-case analysis, bureaucratic
politics, technology out of control, etc. — there is a prior question
as to whether or not there has been a race. To justify the term
"race," any side that is racing has at least to be rapidly increasing
its strategic budgets and forces. Even if the increase does not
proceed at an increasing rate, for the name "race" to make any
sense at all, there would have to be at the very least an increasing
trend. An examination of American strategic budgets and forces
since the mid-1940s suggests that on the principal relevant

440

measures the trend is down. And an examination of the net effect
of qualitative innovation in the strategic forces over the same time
period equally refutes the stereotype about the net destabilizing
effect of technical change. First, look at our supposed quantitative
upward spiral in the total explosive energy that could be released
or in its capacity for indiscriminate destruction.

Total Explosive Energy and "Overkill"

The total explosive energy that could be released by the
strategic stockpile is a measure frequently used to compare U.S.
and Soviet forces by conservative organizations, such as the
American Security Council. It also appears in the popular vivid
comparisons of the total explosive yield of all the bombs dropped
in Korea (200,000 tons) or in the Second World War (5,000,000 tons)
with the explosive yield (measured in tons of some non-nuclear
chemical explosive such as TNT) of a single nuclear warhead,
several of which might be carried in one vehicle today. However,
the drawbacks of such a measure are clear and most obvious in
the vivid comparisons. A single bomb releasing five million tons
of explosive energy (i.e., a five megaton weapon) is incapable of
doing anything like the damage done worldwide from Japan and
Burma to West Europe and Russia by the many tens of thousands
of bombs exploded in the Second World War, even if the total
energy yield were the same. In general, one large warhead with
twice the energy yield of two smaller weapons, unlike them,
cannot be used to attack two very widely separated targets.

Moreover, it was understood at the dawn of the atomic
age that, even though the Hiroshima bomb had roughly one
thousand times the explosive yield of one of the largest Second
World War blockbusters, it would not do structural damage to
an area one thousand times the size, but roughly one-tenth of
that. By comparison with the smaller bomb, some 90 percent of its
energy would be "wasted" in "overhitting" or "overdestroying"
or "overkilling" the nearby area.^* For that comparison then,
not 1,000, but its two-thirds power, 100 is a roughly correct
approximation for determining relative structural damage. And
even in comparing the destructive effect of stocks of bombs that
are less varied in yield, some such adjustment is essential.

However, it is not only conservative polemic that exploits the
misleading measure of gross "megatonnage" of explosive energy.
Some of the crudest polemical uses are by opponents of increases

441

in military budgets. In talking of "overkill," they usually divide
the total population of the world into the aggregate explosive
energy in the stockpile to arrive at some such figure as 10 tons of
TNT equivalent for every man, woman, and child in the world.
Such a measure makes exactly the confusion that the original
discussions of overhitting or overdestruction of the area near the
target were designed to avoid. And it adds several other more
potent confusions besides. It implies that the purpose of stocks
of weapons is and should be exclusively to destroy population,
that what is wrong is not the killing of populations, but their
overkilling. It is not strictly related to hypotheses about a spiraling
increase in total explosive yield, or still less a spiral in the damage
that might be done. However, by suggesting that the stocks are
now far too large, it makes plausible the notion that there has
been a steady exponential increase. In fact, nuclear weapons are
directed at any of a large variety of military targets, and there is
no simple rule for deciding whether one has too many or too few.
That is a problem we need not address here.^' The question we are
asking is whether on this measure there has been an exponential
increase.

IBtfTi 1»t3m[4

The answer indicated in Figure 6 is "clearly not." After an initial
sharp increase, the total explosive energy yield declined from a
peak two-and-a-half times the 1972 figure. And 1972 was about
at the level of 1955. While this aggregate includes, appropriately
for contemporary arms race theories, strategic defense as well as
offense warheads, the decline is about the same for the aggregate
explosive yield of the offense warheads alone.

442

The Number of Strategic Warheads

At the opposite extreme from totting up the energy releasable
by all strategic warheads is a measure that ignores the yield alto-
gether and counts simply warheads. The smallest strategic defense
warheads differ from the largest strategic offense warheads by
many orders of magnitude, but even if we were to limit ourselves
to strategic offense warheads, merely counting warheads while
neglecting yield involves a heroic distortion. In fact, the largest
offense nuclear warhead is roughly a thousand times the smallest
offense nuclear warhead*"— the same as the difference between
the Hiroshima bomb and the largest non-nuclear blockbusters
of the Second World War! Counting the largest and the smallest
each as one — with even-handed justice — would then be exactly
like dismissing the first two nuclear weapons as of negligible
importance since they increased the stocks of "block-busters" by
only a fraction of a percent.

While there is no adequate single common measure for so
heterogeneous a collection of vehicles and weapons, clearly
something better is possible than a simple count of warheads.*^
That the latter is used so uncritically is one of the intellectual
scandals of the current debate on SALT. Nonetheless one may ask
whether the number of strategic offense and defense warheads has
spiraled. And as Figure 7 shows, for this disparate aggregate, the
answer is that it has not. It peaked in 1964 at roughly 30 percent
higher than in 1972 which was about the 1960 level. *^

The sense of post-Sputnik arms race doctrine, with its central
strictures against all weapons aimed at weapons and therefore
against active defense as particularly destabilizing, plainly calls
for including the Spartan, Sprint, Nike-Hercules, Falcon, and
all other defense warheads in the total. However, given the
opportunism of the current debate, it is hardly surprising that,
when convenient, the distortion involved in counting warheads is
compounded by excluding the supposedly most destabilizing —
the defense warheads. In fact, one great oddity is that in spite of
all the fire leveled at active defense, the debaters hardly notice
that U.S. defense warheads, interceptor aircraft, surface-to-air
missiles, and air-to-air missiles have decreased drastically. The
number of offense warheads has increased over time, but their
average yield has decreased even more. From 1958-60 to 1972 they
increased roughly by half. But their average yield was divided

443

by four-and-a-half (Figure 8). It is essential then to consider some
measure in between counting megatons and counting warheads.
We turn now to a measurement widely used for that purpose in
the defense and arms control technical community.

Measures of Relative Destructive Area ("EMT")

No single number adequately measures the destructive power
of military weapons, still less other important attributes of military
forces — their susceptibility to attack, their safety from "accidental"
or mistaken or unauthorized use, their political controllability,
their capability for discriminating between nonmilitary and
military targets, and between friend and foe, their flexibility in
a variety of political-military contingencies, etc. Nonetheless, as
we have said, it is not hard to do better than counting warheads
or counting megatons, and for comparing highly varied stocks of
weapons at two different times or in two different countries, an
index known (misleadingly) as "equivalent megatonnage" (EMT)
has come into widespread technical use. It counts the number of
weapons and their yields but makes a rough adjustment for the
relative waste of explosive energy by the larger weapons through
over-concentration near the target. Taking a one-megaton weapon
as standard, it measures any given stock of weapons in terms of
the number of such one-megaton weapons that under a variety
of relevant conditions would do structural damage over an equal

Ob— B^ibala MipAH^

VanlHI.71

444

EMT, like all other indexes, has its limitations, but it captures
some essentials missed in simply adding unadjusted megatons
or warheads. Figure 9 shows a dramatic decrease since 1960 in
the relative destructiveness, so measured, of the U.S. strategic
force. At its peak it was nearly double the 1972 figure; and 1972
was roughly at the 1956 level! In any case, no spiral. This measure
is relevant among other things to test the arms race argument
that the uncontrolled destructiveness of U.S. strategic forces
has increased. It has not. The area that might sustain structural
damage has been halved and there has been a similar decline in
potential fallout.

Offense and Defense Budgets

I could reinforce these results using curves on further physical
measures. Instead I turn now to measures of the resources used
in deploying a strategic force. Since these resources must be
diverted from important alternative civilian uses, such measures
are properly at the heart of the defense debate. In any case, they
are central to arms race doctrines. Expenditures on strategic forces
are most frequently identified as the variable that is supposed to
be accelerating.

-I 1 1 1 I t L.

« £1 6t U

Tt Ti 1* n

445

Figure 10 shows the total strategic budget as measured in the
Defense Department Program I,** extending back to the Second
World War. The top curve shows that the strategic budget in 1976
dollars declined from a peak of $32.6 billion in FY 1952 to %7.7
billion in FY 1976. Strategic expenditures have fluctuated, with a
brief sharp decline and recovery after Korea, to very high levels
varying between $24 and $28 billion in the seven years beginning
in 1956; and then a more or less steady drastic decline to the recent
low levels. In short, in real terms the strategic budget was well over
four times higher during the Korean War and about three times as
high at the end of the Eisenhower Administration as in 1976. This
scarcely looks like an exponential increase in strategic budgets —
more like an exponential decrease.*^ For the 24 years from 1952
to 1976, the average rate of decline was about 5 percent. For the
15 years from FY 1961 to FY 1976, there was a decline averaging
8 percent per year. I want to stress that this long-term decline is
not simply [measured] as a percentage of GNP but in real terms.
It is an absolute decline. Since real GNP was rising while strategic
budgets in real terms were declining, strategic spending declined
even more as a percentage of GNP. In percentage of GNP it was
nearly seven times higher in the early 1950s and about five times
higher in the late 1950s than in FY 1976 (3.2 percent and about 2.5
percent compared with .48 percent).

How is it possible for the constantly expanding literature
on ever-accelerating strategic budgets to ignore this increasing
divergence between doctrine and reality?

First, exponents using the doctrine as a weapon in budget
battles handle rather carelessly the familiar distinction between
real and inflated dollar costs. This can hide somewhat the drastic
extent of the decline, but not the decline itself. Even in current,
depreciating dollars the budget dropped from generally high
levels in the 1950s and a peak of $12.1 billion in 1961 to %7.7 billion
in 1976.*"

Secondly, the curves show minor local peaks and dips. Men
concentrating on the immediate budget fight may easily take an
ant's eye view. Looking forward from the bottom of a shallow
local dip, the future looks all uphill. This opportune but myopic
focus has tended to obscure the very trends that any arms race
doctrine would have to confront. Such doctrines after all do not
pretend to be concerned only with the brief rise, say, from 1960
to 1961. An intense focus on the current year's budget battle also

446

leads to a related confusion: comparing the new budget request
not with last year's request, but with the actual amount approved
by Congress in the prior year — which can be considerably less. For
example, for the defense budget as a whole, the total obligational
authority approved in 1973 was $3.6 billion less, and in 1972 $4.1
billion less, than the amount requested. For the FY 1974 strategic
program the net difference between the requested and total
obligational authority appears to be about $0.5 billion.

Thirdly, the drastic fall in strategic budgets measured in
Program I may be partially obscured by adding in a rising but
quite arbitrary "overhead" figure.*^ The program budgets for
strategic or for general purpose forces aim to include all the cost of
equipment, materiel, and personnel that can be directly attributed
to the program mission, including all support costs that "follow
directly from the number of combat units. "*^ Overhead allocations,
whatever their accounting uses, are by definition arbitrary, and
those now current have little or no causal relation to past or future
reductions in the number of strategic combat vehicles. These
arbitrarily allocated costs have tended to remain the same or to
rise even though the strategic forces and their direct costs have
been greatly reduced.

The formula for budgets that the Brookings Institution uses,
which we call "Method I," would assign to the strategic forces
an amount of overhead equal to less than half their direct costs
during the 1950s, and over one-and-a-half times their direct costs
in 1974.*' Meanwhile, direct costs of general-purpose forces have
varied in size from less than one-and-two-thirds to nearly five
times the direct costs of the strategic forces, and the formula, year
after year, splits the Intelligence and Communications budgets
evenly between them. Of course, it has always been clear that
some of these "overhead" costs may vary inversely with direct
costs. Take Intelligence for example. Large SALT (or unilateral)
reductions might call for greatly increased national means of
monitoring variations in adversary forces, since marginal absolute
changes make a larger proportional difference in small forces. (Dr.
Wiesner in the past has suggested that inspection might have to
double if the forces were halved, and so on linearly.) But then one
should expect future cuts in the direct costs of strategic forces to
be partly offset by increases in Intelligence costs.

If one considers not merely what causes changes in
"overhead," but also what the effects are of increases in overhead
on an adversary, it is hard to see how these programs, many

447

of which could well be classified under Human Resources or
Social Welfare, would strike terror in the heart of an enemy. For
example, CHAMPUS (Civilian Health and Medical Program of
the Uniformed Services) includes such items as medical care for
retirees, their dependents, and survivors. A drastic cut in the
number of strategic combat vehicles would hardly decrease these
costs, and their increase should hardly seem menacing to the
Soviet Union.

Nonetheless, even if these arbitrary costs are added on, they
can only partially obscure the drastic decline. Using the formula
Brookings applies to past budgets, the FY 1962 strategic forces
budget was nearly double that in FY 1976 (this is displayed in the
dashed line in Figure 12). The method Brookings applies to future
projected budgets is less reducible to formula and involves more
subjective judgment and even larger uncertainties.^"

a ''-''■'-' - ■.■■■<... I ... I

If that method were applied to determine past trends,
however, the decrease would be more drastic. Still other allocation
methods, all necessarily arbitrary, show declines from a peak more
than double the present budget. So for example, a method used
by the Department of Defense shows a decline in FY 1976 dollars
of over $2 billion in the late 1950s from a peak 2.5 times as high as
the FY 1976 budget including overhead. With recently improved
deflators the decline would be even larger. ^^ Overhead allocations
have their uses, but they are limited. All of them distribute some

448

unallocatable costs. When added to program costs without any
breakdown, they obscure more than they illuminate change.
Nonetheless, no overhead allocation with which I am familiar
can hide the sharp declines in strategic budgets. Whether the
decline is from a peak over four or two-and-a-half or twice recent
levels, that should be fatal to the dogma about "ever-accelerating
spending."

Nonetheless that dogma does die hard. Paul Warnke, for
example, has agreed that some facts do damage the arms race
figure of speech. But he talks of our continuing tendency "to
spend these steadily increasing billions" and of our "formula
for endless escalation in defense costs." Indeed, Warnke is so
seized by the idea that the U.S. strategic budget and the defense
budget as a whole have been steadily climbing that he can read
a long document devoted to showing that both budgets have
been sinking for years, with plunging graphs to illustrate, and not
notice. ^^ He did not, for example, notice the point of the article
which painstakingly showed evidence of the drastic fall in the
strategic program budget in real terms over the preceding 14 years.
(The defense budget as a whole had been declining for a shorter
time — since 1968.) He understands it to be saying that the United
States and the Soviet Union have both been increasing strategic
spending, but at different rates. Running at different speeds, he
thinks, might still be a race. However, we have been moving not
only at different speeds, but in opposite directions. If that doesn't
do lethal damage to the arms race metaphor, nothing will.^^

Fourth, in spite of the fact that arms race theorists take
strategic defense along with counterforce as the villain in the piece
and the principal force driving the race, they sometimes look for
exponential increases in strategic budgets that cover only offense
and allow for no compensating decreases in strategic defense.
However, in 1962 the budget for offense taken alone was over
three times its 1976 level. ^^

Fifth, I suspect the major reason for failure to observe the
decline is that public debate usually concentrates intensely on the
initial decision to buy and deploy a new system; much less on the
operation and maintenance of the system once in; and hardly at
all on its phasing out. In particular, the present exponents of arms
race doctrines have had their gaze focused on the introduction
of new systems — in line with their dominant preoccupation with
innovation. As advocates they have been very much in on the
beginnings, in favor of the new systems in the 1950s and generally

449

against them in the 1960s. But the phasing out seems to escape
their attention.

Systems starting from zero or near it are likely to grow very
rapidly in the initial phases; they can scarcely go down. It is easy
apparently to slip into the belief that there has been an "across-
the-board growth of our own strategic forces. "^^ However, an
examination of the components of the strategic budget and an
analysis of the entry into the force and the exit of various combat
vehicles suggests the broad solution to the puzzle as to how this
popular impressionistic doctrine can fit the facts so poorly.

U.S. strategic forces have not grown "across the board."
On the contrary, as new systems were brought in, many others,
including some very expensive ones, were taken out. At the end
of FY 1956, for example, the strategic force included nearly 1,500
B-47 and RB-47 medium bombers, some 270 B-36 and RB-36 heavy
bombers, a remnant of the B-50s and B-29s, and nearly 850 KC
97 and KC 29 tanker aircraft, all of which have since made their
exit, along with or preceded by a drastic reduction in overseas
strategic operating bases and a multi-billion dollar cut in overseas
stocks for strategic forces. Between 1956 and the late 1960s the
B-58 supersonic bomber, the Snark intercontinental cruise missile,
the Atlas ICBM, and the Titan I ICBM have come and gone. So
also have the Bomarc area defense missile and most of the Nike-
Hercules and fighter interceptors. In fact, air defense vehicles,
promoted so vigorously in the 1950s by many who oppose them
today as destabilizing, show an exponential decline from a peak
of over 8,000 in 1959 to a force less than one-seventh as large in
1972; and to less than that now.

The terms of the public debate have been scandalously loose
and they have received very little critical attention from the media.
SALT rhetoric and headlines linking new strategic programs to
"Record Defense Spending" help the impression that strategic
budgets especially must be out of control, since they are spotted
as the main culprit in the general increase. In real terms, however,
there has been no general increase in defense spending since 1968.
Witness Figure 13. Picking on the strategic budget as the guilty
party in the nonexistent general increase in the defense budget
as a whole seems particularly absurd, since the strategic decline
has been larger, more consistent, and more durable. But guilt
by association has its effect because the smaller decline in total
defense budgets is more easily obscured by neglecting inflation.

450

It is hard to fault the media when academics and politicians
who specialize in defense and arms control matters themselves
make such blunders, but even so the media's handling of the
defense budget in recent years needs some comment. Take the
distinction between real and inflated changes in dollar amounts.
Although there are some sophisticated questions about methods
of allowing for inflation, the gross sense of the distinction is not
at all arcane. Newsman handle it all the time without stumbling.
When in a recession year, 1970, the American gross national
product neared $1 trillion ($970.1 billion) by comparison with
$930.3 billion the preceding year, no headline greeted the news
by announcing a record advance in production. On the contrary,
the press observed that the GNP in 1970 was lower in real terms
than it had been the year before. But year after year of Defense
Department requests for budgets lower in "real" terms than the
1968 peak have been announced as "record budgets," apparently
because in this case the media regard the distinction as unreal. And
a press that with some justice prides itself on its energetic factual
investigations is considerably weaker on analysis and reflection
about even moderately complex matters. There, predisposition is
more likely to hold sway.

The sloppiness is suggested in the largely unconscious
predispositions implicit in the way the data are described or
pictured. One can find examples among good journalists and
excellent newspapers. Take the following case shown in Figure
14 of the Los Angeles Times announcing the new defense budget
request in February 1974. The article headlines "Record Defense
Spending" and suggests the primary cause for the increase in
new strategic nuclear weapons of the kind that SALT is supposed
to limit. Thus the lead paragraph states, "... a defense budget
surpassing the peak spending period of World War II and laying
the foundation for a new generation of nuclear weapons...." Only
later in the article is it acknowledged that inflation might have
something to do with the budget increases, and even then in
wording that suggests this may just be a Pentagon claim — "While
the research on new nuclear weapons systems could portend
massive new spending several years hence, the $6.3 billion
increase in the Pentagon's new budget largely was attributed to
pay increases and in higher costs across the board for hardware
and supplies."

451

cosAHeeLesTiues

PESRUARV E^ 107*

Record Defense Spending Plan
Includes New Nuclear Systems

n tttmr ab^smsou

MhAqt acM Oan^^m ■ dafuiia
fcf4Cid ■PTiiii^liia Uk« puk tnud-

Ing HTtad 01 W«nd w^ n ant lim-
ine Ih* taunAtUnt &f A Bfeitf s«Mn-

Vftlsn iBiki mtUtwr umdij*,*
Ur. Htxu nM In m. bvd^ mo-

"Ovmama tha ttniB f«quln4 far

fccr wnMV qrstcn* u Ihi|^ dicl-
4ai> madB t^ ^ wIC ibipc tht * VI-
Hy aT U» Utrh«d SIMM U nWlKtAlq
m BUrmtfh a la id^rtan JLmt itnttf."
jq KAliidr ■ Hccwd dklBflil* Mlilljf

vrVfTnt ^Im In Otm jwhccliuitng

nhis raoiB Uwn H famLm tar ttm
d»«r w f p oc j Mn4 prvpvlal^a

rhic ibe Dernv PvpiitiBUii ukaj
Ctar«mt f«r SM9 mllHen for f»
*C«Ttil «nd dcL^Blopnivfit on:

tioCAUl HUbifc ■

iMW jtf for IClVft

—A rmw JBl«Ut-flTUtf ubBHilna

— MabUfl DCBTtb, wblEli woaM hm

MS TEM-YEAR TAEND QF
^FEOGnALINCOnS

The graph, "Ten Year Trend of Federal Spending," accom-
panying in the article, not only reinforces the impression that
national defense expenditures have been steadily climbing; it also
suggests to the casual reader that they are the primary reason for
the growth in the total federal budget. This effect results from
piling the "National Defense" expenditures on top of those for
"Human Resources."

Figure 15 is a redrawing of this chart for clarity, and Figure
16 shows exactly the same data as Figure 15 at exactly the same
scale. ^^ The only change is that National Defense is now presented
on the bottom rather than Human Resources.

The resulting chart gives quite a different and more accurate
impression than that in the article. It shows that the major source
of the increase in federal spending has been increases in Human
Resources, not National Defense.

452

But even Figure 16 is misleading, since it is in current dollars
and hence ignores the effects of inflation. Figure 17 presents the
data of Figure 16 adjusted for inflation, i.e., in dollars of constant
purchasing power. We now see a downward trend in National
Defense spending that is more than overcome by an upward trend
in spending for Human Resources. (In fact, more authoritative
results indicate a sharper downward trend for National Defense
expenditures than is shown in Figure 16. The data in the original
article contain some anomalies. Retirement pay seems to have
been included in the "National Defense" category, and this would
help to explain the slower decline shown.)

Belief in an exploding arms race is so ingrained by now in the
way the media look at things that it seems even the chartmakers
and layout men make their own trompe I'oeil [deceive the eye]
contribution to its existence.

tat-trntm^tlt

-WLifa Nidnkl Dckflea Ro^ff Tha

_l I I I i I I

M U U n 72 74

«4 as 70 71 74

However, the regular annual alarms in the press about an up-
ward trend in the strategic budget can often point to economic
projections /or several future years, based on gleanings from testi-
mony before Congress on Defense Department and service plans.
Such indications of plans can mislead in the same way as compar-
ing this year's budget request with the last enacted budget, but
even more so, since the long-term plans are even more tentative and
subject to attrition than requests formally submitted to Congress.
They must run a recurring gauntlet through many stages of
bargaining and review within Defense, Budget, the White House,

453

and Congress. It is appropriate to study the uncertain long-term
costs implicit in various defense plans, but not to treat them as if
they reflected the likely course of defense spending. Brookings
says as much: "A note of warning must be emphasized. The
projections should not be taken as predictions of future defense
budgets. . . ."'^ As with drugs and cigarettes, however, users may
ignore the warning label. (Even Brookings, normally more careful
than its readers, sometimes forgets its own warning.) In any case.
Figure 18 shows vividly that year after year Brookings' projections
of strategic cost have sloped steeply upward, as year after year the
actual budgets have continued to decline. This perpetual picture,
so useful in budget battles, of a strategic budget on the point of
exploding, sticks in our mind rather than any glimpse of actual
history.

JIIO

1& 71 7* 7#

There is an amusing paradox, intelligible only in political
debating terms, about the one-eyed vision displayed by exponents
of arms race doctrines. On the one hand they fail to observe the
increasingly obvious fact that in spite of their theory of invariable
American overestimation of the size of Russian strategic forces,
these forces have for many years systematically exceeded our
expectation. Their one good eye in this case is focused on any
momentary pause in the continuing deployment and expansion
of existing strategic weapons systems. They turn a blind eye when
the Russians start new systems. They see the Russians stopping,
seldom starting. On the other hand, when it comes to U.S. strategic

454

forces, they can barely preserve their belief that the American
strategic budget is rising at an accelerating rate by fixing their gaze
narrowly on the phasing in of new systems or their continuance
and by neglecting the phasing out of the old. For the Americans,
it seems, they notice the starts, not the stops. If they cannot find
a trend of increase in the plunging figures of the last 24 years,
they find it in rosy service visions of the future, undampened by
Executive or Congressional budget considerations.

However one explains the failure of arms race theorists to
note the deviation of reality from their theory, it is quite plain
that reality has diverged massively — not only in the facts of
Mwderestimation that destroy a principal element of the supposed
dynamics of the arms race, but also in the plain fact that the United
States has not been running a quantitative strategic race.

It would be possible to present similar results for many others
measures: for example, while strategic defense vehicles have
declined for a decade and a half from a peak more than seven times
their present number, offense vehicles have remained roughly the
same for many years. The total of strategic vehicles therefore has
gone down. The point should be very clear. There is no serious
evidence of a quantitative strategic spiral.

That is quite a different point from saying that as a result of
these declines, we are uniformly worse off. While I have differed
with many specific development and deployment decisions, on
the whole my view is that the net effect of changes over this long
period, from the mid-1950s through the 1960s to the present time,
has been an improvement in our force in key respects. My view is
indeed the opposite of the commonplace about the exponential arms race
which has it that as we have spent more and more on our strategic forces,
our security has steadily declined. To evaluate the commonplace we
need to consider the nature of the major qualitative innovations in
strategic forces and their net effect.

The Net Effect of Qualitative Change

Theories of the quantitative strategic race are an extraor-
dinary muddle of errors and self-deceptions. Yet notions about
"qualitative races" may be even worse off. In fact the Secretary of
State recently expressed a longing for a "conceptual breakthrough"
that would bring our understanding of qualitative races up to
the present standard on the quantitative strategic race. Heaven

455

forefend! The modesty of this desire, however, may measure the
current confusion about qualitative competition.

Though discussion is far from rigorous, the kinds of changes
usually thought of as "qualitative" are alterations in some relevant
unit performance characteristic. The most obvious historical
example is the thousand-fold increase in the average unit explosive
yield accomplished by the first A-bombs. A second, almost equally
famous, example is the introduction of the H-bomb in the 1950s
which, as originally envisaged, was expected to multiply the yield
of a single A-bomb again a thousand-fold. Another equally crucial
case is the increase in the average speed of a strategic vehicle
from about 500 to 13,000 miles per hour, made possible by the
development of intercontinental rockets. Other unit performance
characteristics affected by innovation have been mentioned
earlier — blast resistance, concealability, accuracy, reliability, and
controllability, or resistance to "accidental" or unauthorized use.

Some technical changes, it seems obvious, might worsen
the position of everybody. Indeed, many now think that typical
even of civilian technology, which is increasingly assigned all the
hyperbolic traits recently attributed by the Secretary of State to
military technology: it has "developed a momentum of its own/'
is "at odds with the human capacity to comprehend it," is, in
brief, "out of control." Shades of Friedrich Juenger. Or Jacques
Ellul, who holds: "Technique itself... selects among the means to
be employed. The human being is no longer in any sense the agent
of choice," and "everything which is technique is necessarily used
as soon as it is available, without distinction of good or evil. This
is the principal law of our age."'* The use of the A-bomb for Ellul
only illustrates this law and is a symbol of "technical evolution"
in general. Such symbols recall the cloudy determinism of Oswald
Spengler's portentous "that which is a possibility is necessity."

For environmentalists today, as for Juenger, a civilian
technology out of control is the source more typically for polluting
than humanizing the environment. We owe the environmental
movement a debt for stressing that it is important in choosing
among technologies to take into careful account the indirect, long-
term, and public costs as well as the direct, immediate, and private
costs of technical change. It has unfortunately also encouraged the
revival of a more general Luddite view of technology as a threat to
us all. The Luddite view, moreover, is particularly tempting when
it comes to military technology. Most of us have little affection for
weapons; and weapons improvements are likely to arouse a good
deal less enthusiasm than technical advances generally. It is easy

456

to believe that such "improvements" might make things worse all
around.

However, just as in the civilian case one can only choose
technologies and it is highly unlikely that existing technologies
are ideal, so also in the military case it is extremely implausible
that current technologies are optimal, that they fit our political
purposes beyond any possibility of improvement. We have to
choose and we do. But the conditions of thoughtful choice are only
obscured by the immoderate rhetoric, characteristic of Ellul, and
also typical of the arms debate in the post-Sputnik era. So Lipton
and Rodberg talk of the "mystique of technological progress
within the defense establishment, where feasibility is equated
with obligation, where if we can build it, we must."^' A purple
passage of that sort is expressive. But what is its meaning? It has
no plain application to the real world in which a very long list
of development projects was cancelled after much spending, but
before deployment.*" And many more development ideas were
stillborn before any substantial money had been spent in their
pursuit.

Moreover, it is clear that qualitative changes need not affect
both sides badly. Some changes might benefit one side primarily
as radar favored the British more than the Germans in the Second
World War. Still others might conceivably help both, since the two
sides have some objectives in common. So, for example, fail-safe
techniques that prevent a war from starting by mistake through
a failure of communication or a false alarm, or Permissive Action
Links that prevent local arming of weapons without a release from
a remote responsible command center, and modes of protection
that make it possible to ride out an attack and depend less on
hair-trigger response. Neither side would like to see a nuclear war
start by "accident" or through some unauthorized act.

The problem of judging the effect of a specific qualitative
change in key performance parameters is complicated by the fact
that it may be ambiguous. It may serve the interests of just one
adversary in some particular respect and in another respect the
interests of both. For example, improvements in reconnaissance
may permit more precise location and destruction of a target, but
also may reduce collateral damage and serve as a key national
means of verifying that alterations in an adversary's force are no
more menacing than is permitted by an arms treaty. The SALT
agreements would be infeasible without precise national means
of surveillance other than ground inspection. No case-by-case

457

analysis of qualitative changes since the inid-1950s can be given.
However, it is unnecessary for the purpose of evaluating the
Luddite stereotype in the contemporary debate. According to that
stereotype, major innovations (1) lead to new and higher levels of
strategic expenditure, (2) make strategic forces more destructive,
(3) make them less secure, and (4) make them harder to control
politically. To test this familiar view, it is important to look broadly
at the net outcome of such major technological innovations as the
development of fusion weapons and strategic rocketry.

Before forming some judgment on this subject, it may provide
perspective to observe that the view of innovation as generating
an unstable arms race, though widespread in recent times, is by
no means universal. One of the few serious studies of arms races,
that by Samuel P. Huntington, held that military innovation was
fundamentally benign, among other reasons because it enabled
the redeployment rather than the increase of arms budgets.*"^
Moreover, since it did not increase the share of national resources
devoted to defense, it did not produce the strains leading to war,
but in fact made war less likely.

Huntington's hypothesis about the effect of technological
change, though it runs counter to the present fashion, is by no
means implausible. A qualitative improvement has to do with
some relevant performance characteristics of a weapon. Painting
bombs blue, for example, would not generally qualify as an
improvement. Increasing the explosive yield for a given weight
or the accuracy of delivery would. Such changes mean that
effectiveness per unit or per dollar is increased and this implies
in turn that a given task might be done with fewer units or at less
expense.

To meet an adverse change in a potential enemy's force, then,
a government has the alternative, through qualitative change,
to redeploy resources, just as Huntington asserts, rather than
simply to multiply them. He also points out that a self-imposed
or a treaty constraint on improving qualitative performance may
impel a simple multiplication of units — that is, it may generate a
quantitative race. Moreover, though it is possible that opposing
governments may blindly introduce changes that worsen the
position of both sides, and though it is surely true that governments
make a lot of bad choices, they have plenty of incentives for
looking beyond the immediate consequences of a procurement
decision. And not all of their choices have been grossly wrong. It
is not hard to dig up governmental analyses, good and bad, that
look well beyond the next immediate step.

458

Conventional arms race theory presupposes a totally mech-
anical or instinctual behavior, that reacts only to the immediate
move, never looking forward. But it is by no means clear that
governments are as fatally concentrated on the immediate as
arms race theorists debating the current budget. Both the U.S.
and the Russians introduced (in good part independently) the
revolutionary technologies of rocketry and fusion weapons. But
we made adaptations in our force that exploited these technologies
precisely to avoid the kind of deterioration the dogma suggests is
automatic.

The main methods worked out in the early 1950s for
protecting the strategic force based in the United States for the rest
of the decade depended on tactical warning and a rapid, safely
repeatable response by our force that did not commit it to war
on the basis of substantially uncertain warning. These methods
could work reasonably well, so long as the speed of attacking
vehicles was that typical of manned aircraft. But it soon became
clear that strategic rockets were likely to be a feasible operational
component of strategic forces in the 1960s.

Rockets, because of their speed, might, in current jargon, have
been described as "intrinsically destabilizing." However, no single
performance characteristic taken in isolation, whether speed or
accuracy or whatever, can be so established. If one had believed
that speed was intrinsically destabilizing, one might conceivably
have tried to get an agreement banning rockets altogether; or tried
to increase their travel time by getting agreements to use extreme
lofted trajectories; or — still more far-fetched — an agreement
to orbit them several times before landing; or (as discussed in
the 1958 Surprise Attack Conference) to construct an elaborate
international warning system shared with adversaries in order
to preserve the possibility of timely, secure response. Instead of
trying simply to stop or slow down technology, the tack taken
to maintain an improved second-strike capability was to make
unilateral adaptations that exploited both the initial limitations of
the new rockets, specifically their great inaccuracy, and also their
substantial advantages for defense penetration and for developing
new, cheaper, and better modes of protection against attack,
including mobility. Useful adaptations of the new techniques
were feasible, even though our understanding of them was only
partial and uncertain. Our adjustments to them did not have to
be made all at once. They were made incrementally as various
pitfalls and opportunities presented by these techniques became
plainer.

459

In short, in spite of the recent as well as the age-old romantic
antagonism to technology and the belief expressed by such critics
of technology as Jacques Ellul, we are not slaves to technique. We
can and do make technical choices, and in doing so sometimes
improve matters. The alternative is an indiscriminate hostility to
innovation per se, but that rests on the implicit assumption that the
point at which we have arrived cannot possibly be improved — a
rather odd view for the critics of technology to hold, who otherwise
stress the arbitrary and irrational process by which past decisions
on development have been made. In effect, an antagonism to
all innovation amounts to a sentimental attachment to older
technology rather than a hostility to technique in general.

A study of the major changes in technologies from the 1950s
to the present and their effects on the strategic force supports the
view that whatever the false starts and mistakes in detail, on the
whole the outcome was exactly the reverse of the stereotype in the
four respects listed above.

Much of this is implicit in the analysis of quantitative changes
already offered. So I can be brief. First, strategic spending did
not rise to new levels. From the late-1950s it fell almost by two-
thirds. Second, the relative destructiveness of our strategic forces
as measured by EMT declined. Moreover, in precise contradiction
to the standard view, this decline responded in good part to the
increased size and effectiveness of actual and anticipated Soviet
active defenses. On the whole, the shifts in the American force
from gravity bombs to air-to-surface missiles carried on strategic
aircraft and to ICBMs and SLBMs themselves were in the first
instance basically a response to the formidable growth of Russian
air defenses. But these as well as later developments meant a drastic
reduction in total and average explosive yield and in EMT. Third,
through such devices as placing rockets on submarines moving
continuously underwater or in highly blast-resistant complex
silos, the strategic forces became less vulnerable than they had
been in the 1950s — with a resultant increase in stability. In the mid-
1950s our strategic forces were concentrated at a few points, were
soft, slow to respond, inadequately warned, and inadequately
protected by active defense.''^ The Soviet forces were even more
vulnerable, and remained so much longer, but greatly improved
in this respect in the mid-1960s. Fourth, the controllability of the
force was improved by the very methods of protection adopted,
which made hair-trigger response unnecessary; also by a variety
of fail-safe devices and arrangements permitting positive control

460

and by improving the protection of the command and control
arrangements themselves.

Finally, many of the measures that so improved the strategic
force were adopted self-consciously as alternatives to simply
multiplying the force and increasing budgets. They did not under-
take the hopeless task of stopping qualitative change. Rather, they
adapted qualitative change roughly to our purposes, not all of
which are incompatible with those of potential adversaries.

The combination of fusion weapons and missiles that enabled
us to choose cheaper, safer, less destructive and better-controlled
strategic forces were some of the very technologies that were
thought at the time inevitably to have the opposite effects. Fusion
warheads and the vastly increased speed of strategic rockets in
particular made obsolete existing methods of protecting strategic
forces, but they opened up new opportunities to increase the
stability of the force. The principal effect of fusion technology was
not so much to make weapons higher in yield, but to make low-
and medium-yield weapons smaller, lighter and cheaper. This in
turn made it possible to put them in rockets more easily protected
by blast shelters or in constantly moving submarines. An attempt
simply to stop or slow this technology would have reduced
the survivability of deterrent forces and therefore diminished
international stability.

Increasing the Choices

Perverse current dogmas center most of all on an attempt to
stop or slow technologies of discrimination and control. However,
the remarkable improvements in accuracy and control in prospect
will permit non-nuclear weapons to replace nuclear ones in a
wide range of contingencies. Moreover, such improvements will
permit new forms of mobility for strategic forces, making it easier
for deterrent forces to survive. More important, they will also
increase the range of choice to include more discriminate, less
brutal, less suicidal responses to attack— responses that are more
believable. And only a politically believable response will deter.

Some technologies reduce the range of political choice; some
increase it. If our concern about technology getting beyond
political control is genuine rather than rhetorical, then we should
actively encourage the development of techniques that increase
the possibilities of political control. There will be a continuing
need for the exercise of thought to make strategic forces secure

461

and discriminatingly responsive to our aims, and to do this as
economically as we can. Agreements with adversaries can play a
useful role, but they cannot replace national choice. And neither
the agreements nor the national choices are aided by the sort of
hysteria implicit in theories of a strategic race always on the point
of exploding.

Language and the Present Political Chaos

Political language — and with variations this is true of
all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists —
is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder re-
spectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure
wind.

Orwell, who said that, prescribed never using a metaphor you
are used to seeing in print as his very first rule for reducing the
decay. That would cut the vast clutter of images about racing and
uncapped volcanoes that we use in order to hide from ourselves
what has been happening and what the issues are. In the chaotic
"debate" about Vladivostok, the proponents claimed it would
put a "cap" or "lid" on the explosive increase. Opponents, from
Senator Jackson to the Left, said it wouldn't: like SALT I it would
only force the continuing of the spiral in strategic spending. But
before and after SALT I, the spiral was pure wind; and it will be
wind in the present political circumstance with or without SALT
II. For the United States, one might conceivably talk about a "shoe"
or a "floor," but hardly a "cap." Vladivostok also illustrates the
absurdity of the exaggerated threat/ "worst case" dynamic. Here,
overblown estimates of future Russian programs may lend a
specious urgency to rapid agreement — another "miracle" for the
Secretary.

And when Secretary Kissinger asks, "What in the name of
God is strategic superiority... at these levels?" he seems to be
saying that it does not make any difference how many more
missiles the Russians have than we — in which case it is hard to
see any urgency in agreement. He sometimes explicitly means
that it makes no difference, because each side now can— in the
stereotype — kill every man, woman, and child several times over.
But that is an example of exactly the use of language Orwell had
in mind. For it implies in fine moral tones that we should measure
the adequacy of our weapons in terms of the number of civilians

462

they can kill. The Secretary, however, does not believe that. He has
also said that attacks on population are a "political impossibility,
not to say a moral impossibility." I am all for probing the premises
of thought on arms and arms control which the Secretary is said
to want. But that can only start when we face up to evasions
making "murder respectable" in such chaste phrases as "counter-
value attacks" and in all the unreflective vocabulary of the arms
race. This is an important part of rethinking policy about our
relations with allies and adversaries, long overdue and essential
for reducing the present chaos.

ENDNOTES - Wohlstetter - Racing Forward? Or Ambling
Back?

1. I am indebted to many colleagues but especially to David
McGarvey, Steven Honda, Gregory Jones, Robert Raab, Arthur
Steiner, and Zivia Wurtele.

2. Sir Edward Grey, Twenty-Five Years, 1892-1916, Vol. 1, New
York: Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1925, pp. 89-90.

3. John Newhouse, Cold Dawn: The Story of SALT, New York:
Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973, p. 176.

4. See, for example, Morton H. Halperin and Jeremy J. Stone,
"Rivals but No Race: Comment," Foreign Policy, No. 16, Fall 1974,
pp. 88-92, and the views represented in Michael L. Nacht, "The
Delicate Balance of Error," Foreign Policy, No. 19, Summer 1975,
pp. 163-177.

5. Jeremy Stone in Erwin Knoll and Judith Nies McFadden,
eds., American Militarism 1970, New York: Viking Press, 1969, p.
71.

6. Jerome Wiesner and Donald Brennan, eds., Anti-Ballistic
Missile: Yes or No? New York: Hill and Wang, 1969, pp. 13-14.

7. Nancy Lipton and Leonard S. Rodberg, "The Missile Race —
The Contest with Ourselves," in Leonard S. Rodberg and Derek
Shearer, eds.. The Pentagon Watchers, Garden City, New York:
Doubleday, 1970, p. 303.

463

8. Quoted from U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on Armed
Services, Fiscal Year 1972 Authorization for Military Procure-
ment: Hearings, May 3, 1971, Part 2, 92nd Congress, 1st Session,
p. 1767.

9. Quoted from U.S. Congress, House of Representatives,
Subcommittee on National Security Policy and Scientific Devel-
opments of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, National Security
Policy and Changing World Power Alignment: Hearing-Symposium,
May 31, 1972, 92nd Congress, 2nd Session, p. 98.

10. Robert S. McNamara, "The Dynamics of Nuclear Strate-
gy," speech, September 18, 1967, Department of State Bulletin, Vol.
57, No. 1476, October 9, 1967, p. 445.

11. Quoted from U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on For-
eign Relations, Strategic Arms Limitation Agreement: Hearings, June
28, 1972, 92nd Congress, 2nd Session, p. 193.

12. Quoted from U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on For-
eign Relations, Subcommittee on Arms Control and International
Organizations, Arms Control Implications of Current Defense Budget:
Hearings, July 13, 1971, pp. 205-206.

13. Knoll and McFadden, eds., op. cit., p. 68.

14. Edgar M. Bottome, The Balance of Terror: A Guide to the
Arms Race, Boston: Beacon Press, 1972, pp. xv-xvi.

15. William Epstein, "Will the Russians Play 'American Rou-
lette'," Saturday Review World, June 29, 1974, pp 7-8. Epstein is the
former Director of the UN Secretariat Disarmament Division.

16. Bernard T. Feld, "The Sorry History of Arms Control,"
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Vol. 26, No. 7, September 1970, p.
26.

17. Quoted from U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on Foreign
Relations, Strategic Arms Limitation Agreement: Hearings, June 26,
1972, 92nd Congress, 2nd Session, p. 139.

18. John Newhouse, op. cit., p. 133.

464

19. Nancy Lipton and Leonard S. Rodberg, op. cit., p. 303.

20. Quoted from National Citizen's Commission, Report
of the Committee on Arms Control and Disarmament, White
House Conference on International Cooperation, November 28-
December 1, 1963.

21. Jerome Wiesner, Foreword, in Donald G. Brennan, ed..
Arms Control, Disarmament and 'National Security, New York: G.
Braziller, 1961, p.l4.

22. Herbert F. York, "Controlling the Qualitative Arms Race,"
Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Vol. 29, March 1973, p. 4.

23. George Kistiakowsky and George Rathjens in Scientific
American, Vol. 222, No. 1, January 1970, p. 27.

24. Harvey Brooks, "The Military Innovation System and the
Quantitative Arms Races," revised draft distributed at Aspen
Conference on Arms Control, August 1974.

25. Quoted from U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on For-
eign Relations, Detente: Hearings, September 1974, 93rd Congress,
2nd Session, p. 195.

26. E.g., Nancy Lipton and Leonard S. Rodberg, "The Missile
Race — The Contest with Ourselves," in The Pentagon Watchers, op.
cit., p. 303; Dr. Jerome Wiesner, ABM: Yes or No, Santa Barbara,
CA: Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, 1969, p. 18;
Dr. W. K. H. Panofsky, "Roots of the Strategic Arms Race: Ambi-
guity and Ignorance," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Vol. XXVII,
June 1971, p. 15.

27. For the data on the statistical distribution of predictions
on which Figs. 1-3 are based, see Strategic Review, Fall 1974, U.S.
Strategic Institute Report 75-1.

28. Statement of Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara before
the House Armed Services Committee, the Fiscal Year 1964-68 Defense
Program and 1964 Defense Budget, Office of the Secretary of De-
fense, January 1963.

465

29. Predictions in Figures la to Ih exclude short-term esti-
mates that are limited essentially to the completion of launchers
already started.

30. See, for example, Nacht, op. cit.

31. This figure is based on Nacht, op. cit.

32. In this, we follow Nacht.

33. Impressions from even a relevant picture, such as Figure
4b, can stand supplementing by the computation of a few statis-
tics and the summary of the results of a variety of statistical tests
on the differences between predicted and actual silos: (a) The
mean underestimate of -80.1 silos per year is significant (using the
Student's t-test) at the .001 level using the more rigorous "two-
sided" criterion, that is, assuming appropriately that predictions
can exceed as well as understate the reality, (b) The least squares
trend line has an r^ equal to .40, but its slope, -12.59, is signifi-
cant at the .05 level, (c) There is no significant trend up or down
at the .05 level for the sub-period 1965-1969. (d) The worsening
displayed is confirmed by the Student's t-test for the difference
between the sample means for 1962-1964 compared with 1963-
1969. (The difference between predicted and actual is worse for
the second sample at the .01 level.) (e) And finally, the Wilcoxon
two-sample test, a robust "distribution-free" test, using only rank
orders, also shows that later sample to be worse than the earlier at
the .05 significance level. All of the above tests are two-sided.

34. Such a view was never consistently adopted by Mr. Mc-
Namara. He came to use action-reaction language, and often talk-
ed as if the adequacy of strategic forces could be measured solely
in terms of their use to destroy cities. However, he brilliantly at-
tacked the overkill theory and continued through his last Posture
Statement to insist that we keep the objective of limiting damage
in case deterrence failed.

35. See, for example, "The Soviets... are not seeking to engage
us in ... the quantitative race.... There is no indication that the So-
viets are seeking to develop a strategic nuclear force as large as
ours." "Interview with Robert S. McNamara, Defense Secretary,"

466

U.S. News and World Report, April 12, 1965, p. 52. Compare the
Military Balance, 1962-1963, London, Institute of Strategic Stud-
ies, p. 2: "The Soviet Union thus appears committed to a policy
of 'minimum' or counter-city deterrence in relation to the United
States, though the large medium range missile force it has now
developed and deployed against targets in Europe and Japan may
serve as both." This view was held by men with little else in com-
mon. So, Hedley Bull: "... The Soviet Union did not embark upon
the massive programme of intercontinental missile construction
that had been anticipated, but seemed to settle for the sort of ca-
pability that in the United States is associated with the policy of
'minimum deterrence.'" The Control of the Arms Race, New York,
2nd ed., p. xxii; and Richard J. Barnet and Marcus G. Raskin: "...
Where we once believed that the Soviets were bent on surpassing
the U.S. in military power, it now appears that ... they are quite
willing to put up with a missile gap: Indeed, we have been run-
ning much of the arms race with ourselves." After Twenty Years:
Alternatives to the Cold War in Europe, New York: Random House,
1965, p. 4.

36. For this focus on the momentary or partial causes, see, for
example. The New York Times, April 27, 1969; Chicago Sun Times,
April 22, 1970; Milwaukee Journal, April 26, 1970; SIPRI Yearbook
of World Armaments and Disarmament, 1969-1970, New York: Hu-
manities Press, 1970, p. 53; Wall Street Journal, December 17, 1970;
Manchester Guardian, November 7, 1971; and Survival, September/
October 1972.

37. These two cases of failed predictions are described in Leon
Festinger's When Prophecy Fails, Harper Torch Book, 1964; and in
his Theory of Cognitive Dissonance, Stanford, 1967. Festinger's mod-
el of cognitive dissonance fits the history of the theory of system-
atic overestimation rather well.

38. For an early appreciation of this point, see, for example, P.
M. S. Blackett, Fear, War and the Bomb: Military and Political Conse-
quences of Atomic Energy, London, 1948.

39. I address it briefly in Fred Warner Neal and Mary Kersey
Harvey, eds., Pacem in Terris III, Vol. II, The Military Dimensions of
Foreign Policy, Santa Barbara: Fund for the Republic, Inc., 1974. I
favor a U.S. -Soviet reduction to equal lower totals. That is quite

467

independent of the question as to whether the U.S. totals have
increased exponentially or at all.

40. Even this fact (and not merely its implications for the in-
comparability of the elements in the aggregate of offense war-
heads) is not always recognized. It is sometimes said that U.S.
strategic warheads in general are in the megaton range. See, for
example: Arms Control: Readings from Scientific American, San Fran-
cisco: W. H. Freeman and Co., 1973, p. 179.

41. One argument for simply counting warheads is the notion
that the dangers of an accidental detonation increase linearly with
that number. However, this is plainly false. The probability of an
accidental, unauthorized detonation depends among other things
on arrangements for weapons safety and for the centralization of
control and command over these weapons.

42. The curves on numbers of warheads (Figure 7 and bottom
of Figure 8) are smoothed in order to approximate the calculated
data points, but closely enough so that deviations from the trends
discussed are not significant.

43. The EMT of a weapon is computed by raising its yield,
expressed in megatons, to the two-thirds power.

44. Program I refers to Strategic Forces. Program II refers to
General Purposes Forces. We have used unpublished computer
tabulations dated July 24, 1975, available from the Office of the
Assistant Secretary of Defense, Comptroller (Programs and Bud-
get) of Total Obligational Authority by Program, which were ex-
tended back beyond FY 1956 only recently.

45. The decreasing exponential fit is rather good. The r^ for the
period 1952 is .75, and the r^ for the period FY 1961-76 is .88.

46. Recent Department of Defense computer tabulations have
revised upward the 1961 current dollar estimate from its earlier-
reported level of $11.5 billion.

47. See, for example, "The Advocates," WETA-TV, Washing-
ton, DC, February 14, 1974.

468

48. Martin Binkin, "Support Costs in the Defense Budget,"
Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Staff Paper, 1972, pp. 45-
46.

49. The Brookings Institution uses a different method, which
we call "Method II," when estimating the effects on overhead of
future reductions in the strategic combat forces. We are indebted
to Barry Blechman for generous help in explaining Brookings'
methods.

50. If I were to suggest changes to Brookings, one would be
to display separately, in past and future budgets, the overhead
fraction. For future budgets especially this would help. It is easy
to expect greater overhead savings from direct program cuts than
are likely: total overhead and the direct program budgets have
moved in opposite directions. Yet Brookings' overhead formula
for past budgets, like most such allocations, assumes that over-
head costs vary in a straight line with direct or operating costs
without any time lag. And it loads an increasing proportion of to-
tal overhead onto the strategic budget. For such reasons I present
figures on the strategic budget with and without Brookings' over-
head allocation.

51. Recent improvements in deflators for Total Obligational
Authority take into account the fact that a substantial fraction of
the funds authorized in a given year are spent in later years.

52. Paul C. Warnke, "Apes on a Treadmill," Foreign Policy, No.
18, Spring 1975, pp. 12-29.

53. Maybe nothing will. As an even more striking example of
how hard the dogma dies, consider the following statement by
Bernard Brodie written after I had assured Mr. Warnke that I was
indeed saying that the total cost of our strategic force has gone
down, not up. "We should note here Albert Wohlstetter's denial
that there is an arms race between the two superpowers, though
he concedes there is an arms competition which raises costs on
both sides." Mr. Brodie cites not only my original paper which
documented the decline in U.S. strategic costs, but also a reply
to Mr. Warnke in which I said again that U.S. strategic costs had
not "escalated" but had gone down. "On Clarifying Objectives
of Arms Control," ACIS Working Paper No. 1. Program in Arms

469

Control and International Security, University of California at Los
Angeles, April 1976, p. 22.

54. Arms race theorists, faced recently with the divergence of
strategic budgets from their theory of how they should behave,
have suggested that the decline in the total strategic budget since
it includes defensive forces merely displays the benefit of SALT I,
which limited ABM. But the May 1972 agreements could hardly
have affected anything before FY 1973, and the strategic defens-
es declined drastically many years before that. See, for example,
"The Advocates," WETA-TV program cited above.

55. Nancy Lipton and L. S. Rodberg, "The Missile Race — The
Contest with Ourselves," in The Pentagon Watcher, New York,
1970, p. 301.

56. Figures 15 and 16 were drawn by first reading the data
points on the graphs in the original article as carefully as pos-
sible using a ruler and set square. I do not know the source of the
data used or kinds of budget moneys employed (e.g., obligational
authority, expenditures, or other); or what definitions were used
for the three categories displayed, and I have made no attempt to
justify the data or explain the anomalies in it. In particular, I am
at a loss to explain why National Defense expenditures show a
decline from 1974 to 1975, even though the article talks about a
$6.3 billion increase.

57. B. M. Blechman, E. M. Gramlich, and R. W. Hartman, Set-
ting National Priorities; the 1975 Budget, Washington, DC: Brook-
ings Institution, 1974, p. 306.

58. Jacque Ellul, The Technological Society, New York: Vintage
Books, 1964, pp. 80, 99; cf . Friedrich Juenger, The Failure of Technol-
ogy, Chicago: Gateway Editions, Inc., Henry Regnery Co., 1956,
pp. 163-164.

59. Lipton and Rodberg, op. cit., p. 302. Cf. Richard Barnet,
"The National Security Bureaucracy and Military Intervention,"
paper delivered at Adlai Stevenson Institute, June 3, 1968, p. 27.

60. Nuclear-propelled aircraft, started in 1951 and cancelled
10 years later; the XB-70 bomber started in 1958 and cancelled in

470

1967; the Hard Rock Silo project started in 1968 and cancelled in
1970; the SCAD Armed Decoys begun in 1968 and cancelled in
1973; the Navajo ramjet intercontinental missile begun in 1954,
cancelled in 1957; the Rascal, the Skybolt, the mobile medium
range ballistic missile, Regulus II, the Manned Orbiting Lab, and

61. Samuel P. Huntington, "Arms Races: Prerequisites and
Results," Public Policy, Vol. 8, in Carl J. Friedrich and Seymour E.
Harris, eds., Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958.

62. For a contemporary analysis of the vulnerability of stra-
tegic forces in 1956, see, for example, Wohlstetter, Hoffman, and
Rowen, Protecting U.S. Power to Strike Back in the 1950s and 1960s,
RAND, R-290, September 1956, pp. 30, 41. For earlier analyses by
the same authors, see The Selection of Strategic Bases, R-244-S, April
1953; and The Selection and Use of Strategic Air Base Systems, R-266,
March 1954.

471

On Anns Control: What We Should Look for
in an Arms Agreement (1985)

Albert and Roberta Wohlstetter

Unpublished draft essay, May 20, 1985, available from
the Hoover Institution Archive, Albert and Roberta
Wohlstetter Papers, Notes, Box 118, Folder 16. Courtesy
of the Wohlstetter Estate.

The agreement should serve some clear military purpose, if
only a limited one. Sometimes, to avoid an agreement for which
there is much public and bureaucratic pressure, but which would
plainly do us harm, one might be tempted to make a proposal
in the expectation that it will be turned down. However, such
proposals have a way of being modified so as to be acceptable
to the Soviets without removing the harm they might do to us.
And they often appear unconvincing until they are modified. It's
safer to back a proposal which would clearly be of some definite
military use; this is not always incompatible with being useful to
the Soviets too.

The agreement should aim only at a limited purpose. The
implications of even a limited agreement are hard to predict.
Comprehensive agreements are even harder. Moreover, they are
almost surely unlikely to be verifiable. And even less likely to be
enforceable.

It's best to try for an agreement in an area where it is hard to
accomplish our purposes by unilateral efforts. An example that will
be developed at some length is a carefully restricted agreement
for "keep-out" zones around selected satellites, permitting the
owner of a satellite to destroy any objects in that zone, or in some
cases more restrictively, any object traveling in that zone at the
same velocity as the protected satellite. A carefully designed
agreement might help with the problem of space mines, for it is
particularly hard to deal with that problem solely by unilateral
efforts. However, even a well-designed agreement will not replace
all unilateral effort. This is true in general, and not just for dealing
with space mines, as is suggested by the preceding points, namely
that agreements should be seen as limited and supplementing
unilateral efforts, not replacing them.

Agreements should be of a finite and short duration. It is
hard to end any agreement, even one that is explicitly temporary.

472

but a short agreement is important if we are to make essential
adjustments for unanticipated changes in the state of the art
and in geopolitical circumstances. Unilateral defense decisions
are hard enough even though they are incremental and can be
changed year by year as we understand their consequences better.
An agreement of indefinite duration wagers a great deal on our
being able to predict technical and geopolitical changes and to
understand the strategic consequences of such changes in the
long run. We are good at neither.^

For this reason, one should reject the argument made by
many proponents of arms control today that a treaty of permanent
duration will confer stability because it will enable us and our
adversaries to plan with certainty. On the contrary, it is a sure
recipe for instability because in general we cannot anticipate such
further changes long enough in advance, and a permanent treaty
would prevent us from making incremental adjustments when it
becomes clear that [such changes] are about to occur.

We should look for an agreement which is not only
monitorable, but one which we can enforce unilaterally, and one
that provides strong incentives for us to enforce compliance. In
fact, we want the incentives for our enforcing the agreement to
exceed the incentives for looking the other way.

As the case of the German violations of the Versailles
Disarmament Clause illustrates, democracies have powerful
incentives to ignore violations, even when they are quite plain
and widely known. Versailles provided arrangements for
inspection on the ground and other intrusive arrangements
which are extremely unlikely to be obtained in any agreement
with a closed society like the Soviet Union. Moreover, British and
French inspectors and political figures knew of the violations,
but did nothing — for fear of making it harder to negotiate a new
disarmament agreement; or because political leaders feared the
domestic political consequences of appearing to be insufficiently
enthusiastic about a potential disarmament agreement.

Strategic arms agreements proposed by American advocates
of a declaratory policy of deterrence based on suicidal threats to
destroy Soviet population centers ("Mutual Assured Destruction,"
or MAD) tend also to be premised on the notion that no one can
survive a nuclear war and on the notion also that introducing new
systems to protect population would be wrong. So, the National
Campaign to Save the ABM Treaty states with approval that
"the fundamental premise underlying the Anti-Ballistic Missile

473

Treaty was that nuclear war is not survivable and that a search
for technological solutions to alter this reality would be both
futile and dangerous."^ Agreements based on such a premise are
an outstanding example of the wrong kind of arms agreement.
They assume that "the mad momentum of the race" is driven by
American technical innovation, especially one that would protect
population. And, therefore, to stop the "race" they would impose
compliance on the U.S., no matter what the Soviets do. However,
that removes Soviet incentives to comply. It encourages passive
acceptance, if not total neglect, of Soviet cheating and especially
Soviet interpretations of an agreement that defeat its overt purpose
and, in particular, defeat our purpose in signing the agreement.

While arms control doctrines based on MAD seem designed to
discourage our responding to adversary violations of agreements,
their laxity is not unique. Today the media have made it a
notorious sin not to display total and uncritical enthusiasm for
past as well as future agreements; they take any U.S. government
report of a Soviet violation of current agreements as proving
that the U.S. government doesn't "seriously" want arms control.
Powerful forces of inertia in the bureaucracy, including the
service bureaucracies, tend in the same direction. Administration
leaders have told the Congress and the public that the Soviets
have violated SALT I and SALT II and many other agreements as
well; but have not indicated that we will or should do anything if
the Soviets do not take "corrective action." That presents a serious
domestic problem.

The MAD Momentum ofMAD-Based Arms Control

The "MAD momentum of the strategic arms race," talked
about by Robert McNamara and other proponents of MAD
beginning in the early 1960s, was pure talk. The Soviet Union raced
forward while we moseyed back. They tripled their spending on
strategic forces — accelerating after SALT I. We cut ours by two-
thirds. There has been no MAD momentum in U.S. strategic arms
deployment. There has been a MAD momentum in the one-sided
application of strategic arms control. Even though, today, it is
easy to prove this (Harold Brown, after he was in office, said of
Soviet arms, "When we go up, they go up, when we go down,
they go up"), the administration has not been able so far to deal
adequately with these domestic pressures. We continue to cripple
or slow down our own innovations and continue to tolerate Soviet

474

advances. A more sophisticated and carefully modulated policy is
needed to redress this asymmetry.

The Example of German Violations of the Versailles Disarma-
ment Clause and British and French Complaisance in the 1920s

Negotiations for an arms agreement usually carry with
them a certain amount of euphoria about the ability to enforce
even a vaguely worded agreement. That is part of selling the
agreement to a domestic public in a democracy. It is said that if an
adversary violates the agreement then the world will know, and
fear of world opinion will deter him or shame him into ending
the violation; or, if not, we will end the agreement. Our current
agreements emerge from negotiations entered into voluntarily by
sovereign undefeated states where our means of monitoring are
limited. The means of monitoring and enforcing the provisions of
a treaty imposed by a victor over a much feared adversary would
seem to furnish much more powerful incentives and a much more
favorable environment for enforcing compliance. But history tells
a different story and should temper any hopes we may have today.
The French and British victors in World War I had the means to
enforce compliance by a defeated but dangerous Germany, but
did not use them. Clandestine German rearmament of the 1920s
is a less familiar story of violation than in the 1930s, but it is quite
as illuminating.

The Versailles Treaty was meant to disarm a defeated Imperial
Germany. The successor government of the Weimar Republic
subscribed with overt wholeheartedness to this goal. Karl Joseph
Wirth, then Chancellor of the Republic, was the official who signed
Weimar's acceptance of the Versailles Treaty. The acceptance
said in part: "The German Government is determined ... to carry
out without reservation or delay the measures relative to the
disarmament of military, naval and aerial forces as specified in the
memorandum by the Allied Powers dated 21 January 1921." The
memorandum specified that the "manufacture of arms, munitions
or any war material, shall only be carried out in factories or works,
the location of which shall be communicated to and approved by
the Governments of the Principal Allied and Associated Powers,
and the number of which they retain the right to restrict." It prohib-
ited "importation into Germany of arms, munitions and war mater-
ial of every kind" and the dispatch "to any foreign country" of
"any military, naval, or air mission."^ These regulations followed

475

the scrapping of machines, and machine tools in munitions
factories like the Krupp Works, and the destruction of existing
munitions stockpiles. Moreover, it would seem that whether
or not the leaders of the Weimar government really intended
without reservations to disarm as specified by the Allied Powers,
the allies did not have to rely on their good faith. The Allied
Control Commission had very extensive powers of inspection on
the ground over a defeated Germany, which exceeded by far any
that would ever be agreed to voluntarily by an independent but
hostile and closed society entering into an arms agreement during
a long period of peace.

On the face of it, one might believe an ideal state of disarma-
ment existed in the 1920s in Germany under a new idealistic govern-
ment. Unfortunately at the moment of signing Chancellor Wirth
was already violating his agreement. In a letter to Gustav Krupp
he recalls "with satisfaction" the years from 1920 to 1923 when
he and Krupp director Dr. Wiedfeldt were cooperating "to lay
new foundations for the development of the German armament
technique." President Von Hindenburg, he wrote, "had been
informed.... His reaction was also very creditable, though nothing
of this has yet been disclosed to the public..." Wirth wished to add
this information to his earlier accomplishments "on account of my
initiative as the Reich Chancellor and Reich Minister of Finance,
by releasing considerable sums of the Reich for the preservation of
German armament techniques."* "Preservation" was perhaps the
wrong word. The government was helping to finance an entirely
new line of armaments, since destroyed industries were obliged
to start afresh. And facilities were being provided not only by
traditional neutrals — the Dutch, the Danes, the Swedes — but also
by the Soviet government. To cite only one example, Krupp' s
development of a new tough steel permitted the manufacture of
machines for grenades which turned out one grenade every 12
minutes as compared to 220 minutes earlier.

In Germany, of course, complicated financial maneuvering
became necessary, but double books were not the only means
for eluding a conscientious Allied Control Commission. German
deception became a fine art, even including infiltration of the
Commission so that factories would have adequate warning
of inspection visits. The French representative was especially
vigilant, since for the French government at this time German
rearmament remained an ever present threat. But even the French
representative, who was aware of the deception, was unaware of
its magnitude.

476

The Allied Control Commission as a whole knew of the
deception. It had discovered and reported many evasions
of the Versailles Treaty on the part of industry as well as in
the armed forces. Within the army these included numerous
paramilitary units, which were secretly equipped and armed, a
large expansion in the numbers of police who were housed in
barracks, an illegal General Staff which went under the name
of Trupfenamt or Troops Office (which supposedly took care of
general Reichswehr organizational matters), the covert training
of pilots in the Soviet Union, the growth of a military air force
within the civilian air transport industries, a device of short-term
enlistments, an expansion in the number of NCOs, the use of
wargames and command post exercises to give officers training
in handling strategies for large armies, etc. Within the Navy one
of the most flagrant evasions was construction of submarines
under secret contracts with Spain and Finland. The Allied Control
Commission's final report in 1927 concluded, "Germany had
never disarmed, had never had the intention of disarming, and
for seven years had done everything in her power to deceive
and 'counter-control' the Commission appointed to control her
disarmament."

"Control" has two meanings: one to monitor or observe, the
other to regulate or enforce behavior according to rule. The Allied
Control Commission monitored. It did not compel, nor did it
lead the allied governments to enforce — for all the debate over
verification.

Why were these numerous evasions disregarded by the
governments in question? There are a number of reasons which
will remind us of the situation today, and some that are peculiar
to this period of the Twenties.

First, the Commission itself was divided. Some of its
members were uninterested and performed perfunctorily. Others
welcomed German rearmament as a counter to the French. For
example, a senior naval inspector at the time of the dissolution of
the Commission in 1927, a Commander Fenshaw, told retired Lt.
Renken, his German opposite number, "Both you and I are glad
that we are leaving. Your task was unpleasant and so was mine.
One thing I should point out. You should not feel that we believed
what you told us. Not one word you uttered was true, but you
delivered your information in such a clever way that we were in a
position to believe you. I want to thank you for this."^

477

Commander Fenshaw's view was shared by many of his
British countrymen, who regarded French statesmen as paranoid
on the subject of a revival of German militarism. Edouard Herriot
is quoted as saying to Austen Chamberlain, "I look forward
with terror to her making war upon us again in ten years." And
Raymond Poincare, who resented strongly British indifference
to the risks of a German revival, was regarded as personifying a
French aggressiveness that was a greater threat to European and
world stability than anything likely to emerge from Germany.

Anglo-French antagonisms were reinforced by a feeling on
the part of many in England that Germany was being punished
too severely for her part in the war not only from the point of
view of ethics or justice, but also because the success of the
Russian Revolution had alarmed a good many of these officials.
The specter of communism had begun to haunt Europe and even
before Chancellor Wirth had laid his elaborate plans for deception,
the first President of the German Republic, the Socialist Friedrich
Ebert, recognized that the Social Democrats might suffer the fate
of Kerensky's government if the Spartakist faction gained control
of the Social Democrats and if the armed forces disintegrated as
they had in Russia. The danger of revolution was real. Liebknecht
and Luxemburg on the steps of the Imperial Palace had declared
a Soviet Germany when General Groener stepped in with an offer
to preserve order and maintain discipline with what was left of
the armed forces. Ebert accepted with relief. General Groener
interpreted his mandate to be combating the revolution "without
reservation" and that meant among other things getting rid of
the Workers Councils and the Spartakists, and he accomplished
this in January 1919. His volunteer Free Corps, one of the first
fronts for a clandestine Army, crushed the local Communist
movement. But in the meantime collusion between parts of the
Weimar government and officers of the German Army ensured
the quiet return of both the Army and its new arms, while the
British government looked the other way. A justified fear of
communism motivated the Social Democrats to restore the army
to a key role in the state and this led to the systematic deception
in rearming. A less urgent fear of communism in part motivated
British acceptance of the deception.

As Wheeler-Bennett put it in his heavily documented analysis
of the German Army in politics:

... in 1919 the majority of the leading statesmen of the
world were more afraid of Communist Russia — a new

478

phenomenon of evil — than of a possible revival of the
old Adam of German nationalism, and those who were
shaping the new policies of Germany were quick to take
advantage of the opportunity presented by this aberra-
tion....

... It was, in effect, the only common ground which exist-
ed between victors and vanquished, and already at Wei-
mar there appeared that same line of propaganda which,
twenty years later, was to be used by Hitler — and, thirty
years later, by Dr. Adenauer and Herr Schumacher —
namely, that Germany constituted Europe's first bastion
of defence against Bolshevism.''

Another motive for failure to enforce the Treaty was the hope
that a new disarmament agreement might be reached which would
reduce the need for each nation to rebuild armaments after the war.
In England people had had enough of war. The Bloomsbury elite
were a symptom of this war weariness. They combined fatigue
and a "habit of indecision" with what Wyndham Lewis called
"gilded Bolshevism," a hope and trust that the Soviet experiment
was ushering in a brave new world. When the Armistice was
signed, they celebrated "not so much the victory of the allies, as
Lenin's wisdom in signing a separate peace to 'create and fashion
anew God'."^

Even the most farsighted and thoughtful of men, Winston
Churchill, who was among the earliest and surely was the
most outstanding person to recognize the dangers of German
rearmament and the menace of the Axis powers, was at the start
of the 1920s preoccupied with other matters. As the 1921 Minutes
of the Committee of Imperial Defence (CID) illustrate, he was
disposed to consider the need for social programs to deal with
social unrest after the long hardships of World War I and the
rising danger of communism; and to worry about the serious debt
problem of England. Therefore in defense matters he focused on
ways to reduce British defense spending especially by reducing
the British navy and its ability to defend the Far East. (Churchill,
for many years after this, discounted any Japanese attack in the
Far East as inconceivable in his lifetime. He considered expedients
for defending the Middle East, such as those proposed by Air
Marshall Trenchard, to use strategic bombers to keep the natives
in line cheaply. And he, like others much less foresighted, adopted

479

the Ten Year Rule that Britain could count on their being no war
for the next ten years.)

With domestic problems primarily on his mind he raised no
serious objections to the views advanced by Trenchard and others
that the French air force and French submarine force, not the
German armed forces, were the main threat. He also took part in
meetings of the Committee of Imperial Defence (CID) and made
no principled objection to the view that disarmament agreements,
under the aegis of the League of Nations, would help solve the
financial problems of Britain, in effect by reducing the main threat,
namely that of France.

Churchill, even in 1921, was more circumspect about the
French threat than Trenchard, but he did suggest in these
meetings that, "while it was undesirable to fall out with France
on this question [i.e., the French air menace to Britain] if it could
be avoided ... if France were disagreeable to us in regard to other
matters [i.e., the repayment of their debt to Britain], we might
bring up the question of the strength of Air Forces" (CID #146,
October 2, 1921, p. 3).

Perhaps one of the most fascinating aspects of these meetings
of the CID in 1921 is the way that disarmament agreements, the
financial difficulties of England, and the need for social programs
came up simultaneously with discussions of the use of strategic
bombing as a cheap way of bringing an enemy to sue for peace
quickly. Trenchard, who at other times talked of attacking only
legitimate military targets of war-supporting industry and
avoiding innocent bystanders as much as is feasible, read a
paper in the 139th meeting of the CID on May 27, 1921, which
made clear that he thought of strategic bombing (and especially
strategic bombing that would have to be faced by England) as
having as its purpose "to drive home the fear of personal injury
and loss to every individual." It is not clear that he is advancing
here the position he frequently took that the only good defense in
the Middle East was to drive home the fear of personal injury and
loss to every individual on the other side even more quickly. But
there is little evidence that he displayed interest in discrimination
and precision in that meeting.

Churchill, in the late 1920s, long before it was common, saw
clearly that disarmament negotiations raised more problems than
they solved. "We always seem to be getting into trouble over these
stupid disarmament manoeuvres," he wrote to Donald Ferguson
on September 9, 1928. "And personally I deprecate all these

480

premature attempts to force agreements on disarmament." In
particular, Churchill recognized (as in his splendid "disarmament
fable" which anticipated Salvador de Madariaga, see Appendix
A) the arbitrariness and ambiguity of the capabilities each of the
powers wanted to restrict in others and allow for itself and, most
important, he recognized that France was not the greatest threat,
and that Germany was going to be. He stressed that weakening
France compared to Germany by forcing it to cut its army in
half while allowing the Germans to double theirs in the name of
giving the Germans "equality" was a very bad idea. However,
Churchill's views in 1928 were rare in Britain.*

In Germany, Foreign Minister Streseman pressed continu-
ously for a decision to withdraw the Allied Control Commission,
and he finally accomplished his goal on December 11, 1926.
He had acted in conjunction with the French Foreign Minister,
Aristide Briand, and his British counterpart Austen Chamberlain.
Briand had always been impatient with the "petty details"
brought forward by the Commission, and it is significant of the
temper of the time that he and Stresemann shared the 1926 Nobel
peace prize. The Commission's final report about German non-
compliance with the old disarmament agreement was either
ignored or suppressed.' It was subordinated to flourishing
hopes for a new disarmament agreement — hopes which finally
culminated in the Geneva Disarmament Conference of 1932. Sir
John Simon, the British Foreign Secretary at that time, was an
urgent advocate for rapid and comprehensive disarmament. In
the event this resulted in great pressure on France to reduce its
defense expenditures and the size of its army, in order — in Sir
John's words — "to allow the fair meeting of Germany's claim
to the principle of equality." Under his aegis, the disarmament
plan finally submitted to the House of Commons proposed the
approximate halving of France's army and a doubling of the
German army.

One of the members of the Allied Control Commission, Major
General Temperley, who had been painstaking in his observation
and recording of German violations of the Versailles Treaty,
became the principal military expert for Great Britain at the
Geneva Disarmament Conference of 1932. In spite of his earlier
experience, he did all in his power to promote a new agreement.
The French delegates, on the other hand, concerned about the
growing military strength of their neighbor, had at hand a dossier
listing the continuing German deceptions, which they were

481

planning to present to the Conference. General Temperley wrote,
"I was in possession of our own [dossier] which was not less an
indictment of German good faith, backed up by unimpeachable
evidence." However, he felt that "the past was past and we
saw no particular point in raking it up ... so long as there was a
chance of getting an agreement, I used what influence I possessed
against bringing up the 'secret' dossier. In fact it never was made
public...."^"

We are seeing the same reactions today to the U.S. gov-
ernment's publication of Soviet violations of U.S.- Soviet arms
agreements — a plea to forget our past experience and to stop
rocking the boat. We are reminded of Churchill's words in an
article he wrote for The Daily Mail in the spring of 1932:

There is such a horror of war in the great nations who
passed through Armageddon that any declaration or
public speech against armaments, although it consisted
only of platitudes and unrealities, has always been ap-
plauded; and any speech or assertion which set forth the
blunt truths has been incontinently relegated to the cat-
egory of "warmongering."^^

Arms Agreements Based on MAD, by Paralyzing U.S. Response
to Soviet Union Arms Expansion, Encourage It

The idea that has governed the elite view of arms control in
the U.S. since the mid-1960s proceeds on the assumption that the
U.S. has been driving "an ever accelerating nuclear arms race" in
the strategic field, forcing an increase by the Soviet Union— which
would otherwise be satisfied with a minimal force designed only
to deter U.S. attack by threatening U.S. cities. It assumes:

a) that the U.S. can reliably deter any Soviet use of nuclear
weapons against a major Western country by threatening to
bomb Soviet cities, and that this can be done cheaply without
continuing innovation in nuclear forces and with a much
smaller, exclusively offensive force.

b) the U.S. not only need not defend its population but that
spending for that purpose would be bad since it would
deprive the Soviet Union of the ability to destroy our cities
and so provoke the Soviet Union into new and ever higher
levels of arms spending and possibly into an actual attack.

482

c) spending money on preserving control of our nuclear offense
forces would not only waste resources but provoke the Soviet
Union.

Our elites recommend avoiding waste and provocation by
foregoing defense of our population or any attempt to secure
the ability to keep our offensive forces under control in the event
of war. In fact, even if the Soviets introduce more weapons or
new weapons, it would make no difference. "Neither side can
alter the situation decisively by any foreseeable deployment or
technological breakthrough."^^ As President Nixon put it at the
time of SALT I: "The change required to upset the balance is so
large that it cannot be achieved by limited means. "^^

'Nominally Bilateral Arrangements Actually Reduce U.S. Arms One-
Sidedly

MAD theory would seem to say that the U.S., by unilaterally
renouncing any nuclear capability other than the capability
to bomb Soviet cities, can both end the arms competition and
be safer against nuclear attack. We can reduce our spending
unilaterally. That would seem to make negotiations on arms
agreements restricting the Soviet Union quite unnecessary, and
certainly not urgent. However, our elites are sophisticated fellows
and recognize that the Congress and the American public and
even perhaps the Executive are all too primitive to accept such
unilateral disarmament if it is explicit. They therefore need arms
negotiations and agreements which are superficially bilateral to
get the Congress and the Executive branch to make the necessary
reductions on our side. For that purpose, however, an agreement
need not restrict the Soviet Union — which, they assume has in
any case, no ambitions which would be served by maintaining
an effective nuclear force other than to deter us from attack, and
which has only been forced by us to increase its nuclear arsenal. An
agreement which tolerates Soviet violations, and indeed cripples
our own ability to enforce their compliance, they believe, does
us no essential harm. In short, arms negotiations and agreements
based on MAD serve the practical political function of restricting
us while only nominally (but supposedly safely) restricting the
Soviets.

In fact, MAD theories of deterrence focus almost exclusively
on making sure that U.S. political leaders will never use nuclear
weapons first or second, early or late: They stress (most obviously

483

in recent years) that any nuclear exchange will mean universal ruin
and that we therefore should not take part in any such exchange.
MAD declaratory policy undermines our ability to deter Soviet
attack by relying on a suicidal threat we plainly would not (and
should not) execute if deterrence fails. An arms control agreement
based on MAD, on the other hand, undermines our ability to
restrain a Soviet arms buildup in violation of the agreement by
making it hard to reply with a buildup of our own, since that too
would be in violation of the agreement.

Advocates of MAD never face the problem of how to deter or
respond to a Soviet limited use of nuclear weapons which would
leave the U.S. and other Western countries a large stake in not
sacrificing their populations. They make any response suicidal
and incredible. Similarly, theories of arms control based on MAD
focus almost exclusively on making sure that the U.S. will comply
not only with the letter of that agreement but with the spirit of
the agreement, that we will avoid anything that could be possibly
interpreted as an infringement of the rules; on the other hand, they
sometimes rather explicitly make it safe for the Soviets to violate
the agreement or so to interpret the agreement as to subvert its
nominal purpose in controlling them as well as us. They prepare
an advance apology for Soviet noncompliance.

Such Nominally Symmetrical Arrangements are a Pragmatic Political
Device justifying Actual Asymmetry

It is hard to say how much is self-conscious in this manipula-
tory view of the role of arms controllers as a way of getting Con-
gress and our political leaders to go along with what are effectively
one-sided restraints on us and using the bureaucracy in a way
that enforces American but not Soviet compliance.

However, the arms control community has developed some
legalistic technical arguments which are sometimes quite explicit
on the possibility of exploiting the inertia of bureaucracies to
enforce our compliance and at the same time to predispose the
bureaucracy, the Congress and the political leadership to tolerate
violations by the Soviet Union. For example, Abram Chayes in an
article in Harvard Law Review, March 1972, written shortly before
the ratification of SALT I, argued that "the inertia and imperatives
of bureaucratic operations under a treaty and the contemplated
mechanisms for verification and enforcement" would generate
"forces for compliance." He applies this not only to treaties but

484

also to informal understandings and moratoria. Mr. Chayes gives
us a splendid example of such forces for compliance on our side
operating in the nuclear moratorium of 1958.

After President Eisenhower proclaimed a moratorium
on nuclear testing in 1958, the AEC and Defense Depart-
ment sharply reduced what had been a routine activity:
cranking out test plans and programs. It was no longer
very profitable, from an agency viewpoint or in terms
of the career line of an official, to sit around thinking up
ideas for interesting weapons tests or planning their ex-
ecution. As a result, when the U.S.S.R. resumed atmo-
spheric testing in September 1961, the United States was
not ready to respond in kind. It took six months just to
complete the physical operations. But even when the lo-
gistics were all worked out, no significant tests and ex-
periments had been developed. The tests that were actu-
ally carried out were not very productive for purposes of
science or weapons technology — they were essentially
political.^*

Mr. Chayes believes that this shows that once a treaty or
informal understanding goes into effect "all the classical defects
of bureaucracy become virtues from the point of view of arms
control. Rigidity, absence of imagination, initiative, creativity,
unwillingness to take risks, operations by the book — all are
enlisted in aid of compliance with the agreement (pp. 935-936)."

The example of the test moratorium, however, brings out
an essential flaw in this line of reasoning and this style of arms
limitation. It may seem a minor problem in a theory presented
so grandly and in such general terms about compliance by any
party to any arms agreement. However, it should be enough to
spoil the euphoria. Apparently the familiar rigidity of the Soviet
bureaucracy, which we know is impressive, did not operate to
force the Soviets to comply with the moratorium in either the letter
or the spirit. The Soviet breakout was not a sudden decision, but
as Hans Bethe pointed out in indignation at the time,^' it followed
elaborate preparations for the sudden conduct of such tests on a
massive scale. The Soviet bureaucracy was not generating forces
for Soviet compliance, but proceeding on the orders of their
political leadership and under an elaborate cover and deception
plan to generate a test program. And, in general, the troubadours

485

who sing the virtues of bureaucratic irrationality would mislead
themselves less if they used fewer abstract nouns like "compli-
ance" and more verbs like "complying" or "violating" or
"deceiving" with names of real countries as subjects and objects
of the verbs. But of course that would reveal to themselves
and to the public that they are really talking about forcing U.S.
compliance and making it difficult for the U.S. to penalize Soviet
noncompliance .

Roger Fisher, also of the Harvard Law School, has talked about
a zone of doubtful conduct which establishes "a precautionary
rule" — "some distance back from the interest we are trying to
protect, so that a breach of the rule does not necessarily offend
that interest" {op. cit., p. 937). It is true that the United States has
taken such precautions to avoid infringements on the unratified
threshold Test Ban. But the Soviets have exploited the uncertainty
in the other direction, in order to exceed the threshold. In this they
rely on the inertia of our bureaucracies to escape any sanctions or
denunciations of the informal understanding.

In fact. Professor Chayes himself observes the Soviets are
"strict constructionists" who interpret a limitation in such a way
as to restrict themselves as little as possible. That is, anything
that is not very plainly prohibited by the agreement, they take as
permissible:

"The very meaning of a line in the law is that anyone
may get as close to the line as he can if he keeps on the
right side." (Quoted from Justice Holmes, 1916.) In fact,
this view finds expression in Soviet strict constructionist
doctrine, which holds that a government is bound only
to the extent of its express consent. ^''

In brief, the Soviets will tend to stay as far as possible on the
noncompliance side of the line, secure in the knowledge that the
U.S. advocates of arms agreements will keep the U.S. as far as
possible on the compliance side. And all this can take place without
any clear violation of the letter of the agreement, regardless of
what damage it does to the "spirit."

However, the Soviets can, and have, plainly violated even
the letter of agreements with impunity. This has involved the
masking of signs of what they were doing, but no great risk when
the mask is dislodged or removed. The inertia of Western political
leaders and Western bureaucracies makes the job of an adversary

486

interested in deception easier. He need not suppress all signals of
his violation. He can in fact avoid sanctions even if agencies of the
U.S. government are aware of "probable" violations, or "almost
certain" violations, or just plain violations. The Soviets have been
able to depend on the desire of Western decisionmakers to avoid
denouncing violations for fear of spoiling the possibility of future
agreements, or out of fear of being accused of wanting to spoil
arms control.

The U.S. tends to avoid obtaining a capability which may
be extremely important for the purpose of the agreement (for
example, a precise non-nuclear missile, that could replace the sort
of nuclear missile restricted by the agreement) if that capability
(e.g., the same precise missile, but with a nuclear as distinct from a
nonnuclear warhead) also permits activities of a kind restricted by
the agreement. In fact we often avoid attaining a capability which
would further the overt purpose of an arms agreement because it
would make it possible for us to avoid the letter of the agreement.
(We have avoided or delayed developing precise non-nuclear
missiles which could replace missiles with nuclear warheads and
so reduce our reliance on nuclear weapons on the ground that
such nonnuclear missiles could carry nuclear warheads. So the
now expired moratorium on cruise missiles in SALT II.)

At the same time we tolerate Soviet forces which are easily
capable of functioning in ways restricted by the agreement, so long
as the Soviets claim that their purpose in fielding these particular
forces is not incompatible with the agreement. And in fact there
may be some "Functionally Related Observable Differences"
(FRODs) which they point to as indicating their benign intent. The
differences displayed in "FRODs" usually are trivial and seldom
seriously restrict the Soviet's ability to defeat the agreement.

Professor Chayes notes that "in the recent Cold War period,
the rubric has been that since it was impossible to be sure of
the other side's intentions, policy decisions should be based on
capabilities." In brief. Professor Chayes thinks we should take a
more relaxed attitude towards a Soviet capability to shoot down,
say, one of our ICBMs or SLBMs even though it might seem to
violate the ban on defense against strategic ballistic missiles. We
should depend rather on being able to predict whether or not the
Soviets will expand that capability and use it in that particular
way. The supporters of MAD declaratory policy, and of arms
negotiations based on the assumptions of that policy, have
been singularly unsuccessful in predicting Soviet behavior — or

487

even in noticing what Soviet behavior has been in past Soviet
deployment — and especially poor in noticing how badly our
predictions of Soviet deployments have matched the realities
that eventuated. There is no reason to believe that their ability
to predict will improve enough to reassure us that a violation
is insignificant. However, once again it appears that this sort of
relaxed view of Soviet compliance in letter or spirit is not matched
by an equally relaxed view about American compliance among
American elites who base their arms control policy on MAD.
There are some immediate important current examples.

Alan B. Sherr, who heads the Lawyers Alliance for Nuclear
Arms Control, published a brief in June 1984 on "Legal Issues of
the 'Star Wars' Defense Program." He says,

A major perceived loophole in the ABM Treaty is that
weapons development which clearly would be prohib-
ited if intended for use in an anti-ballistic missile system
can proceed unhindered if intended for use, at least ini-
tially, in an anti-satellite (ASAT) system. As a matter of law
and sound policy, however, capability, rather than intent
is the applicable standard. As a factual matter, it appears
that some projects have an ABM capability even though
they are currently referred to as serving an "ASAT role."
Contrary to current practice, therefore, the development,
testing and deployment of such weapon systems or com-
ponents are barred by the ABM Treaty independent of
whether they are "tested in an ABM mode" (pp. 15-18).

In short, however benign our apparent intentions (and Mr. Sherr
regards us as suspect), it is enough that we could use a capability
actually designed to destroy Soviet satellites (a capability not
restricted by SALT I) to commit the cardinal sin of destroying a
Soviet ICBM on its way to destroy an ICBM base in the U.S. or to
annihilate an American city (a sin which is drastically restricted
in SALT I).

The Soviets, as might be expected, take a different view.
They now have ways of destroying (or disabling for critical
periods) American satellites. And under the Anti-Satellite Treaty
they propose they could continue to have such capabilities. No
problem. They would not use them that way, and even if they did,
once they had destroyed our satellites, we could always verify that

488

our satellites had been destroyed. Academician Velikov recently
said.

You can kill with a hammer. So it is logically stipulated
that you'll be punished not because you have a hammer
but because you try to kill with it. The same reasoning
applies to the treaty on antisatellite weapons that we
propose. Of course, there exist ways of destroying satel-
lites, any stupid ways [sic]. If we can dock with a satel-
lite, then clearly we can dock with an American satel-
lite, but a bit carelessly, and thus destroy it. But the idea
of our proposal is that there is no problem in verifying
whether or not a satellite has been destroyed.^''

Of course, that verification might come a little late.

Mr. Sherr, one may predict, is unlikely to insist on strict
banning of the Soviet capability to destroy our satellites in some
future ASAT treaty. However, he does insist that developing
U.S. capabilities now, when there is no ASAT treaty, has already
violated the ban on developing and testing a capability to defend
against Soviet strategic ballistic missiles.

Since No Military Capability is Unambiguous, MAD-Based Agreements
Tolerate a Pervasive Asymmetry between the Soviet Union and the
U.S.

An offensive force can be used in a preventive war to preclude
attack; or as a deterrent and to retaliate to attack. A defensive
force can be used to preserve the ability to respond to an attack by
an aggressor and contain the catastrophe to civil society wreaked
by his attack; or it might be used to supplement an offense force
in an aggression by interposing an extra barrier to the victim's
response.

Attempts at qualitative disarmament or freezes today
which act as if one could tell whether a system or a performance
characteristic has a "first-strike character" or a "second-strike
character," simply by inspection without looking at the many uses
in differing contexts, misunderstand the first-strike/ second-strike
distinction. Such attempts repeat the interwar confusions of the
"qualitative disarmament" which tried hopelessly to distinguish
between "offensive weapons" and "defensive weapons." It is

489

worth quoting Winston Churchill once again on the subject of
such qualitative disarmament:

The Foreign Secretary told us that it was difficult to di-
vide weapons into offensive and defensive categories. It
certainly is, because almost every conceivable weapon
may be used in defence or offence; either by an aggres-
sor or by the innocent victim of his assault. To make it
more difficult for the invader, heavy guns, tanks, and
poison gas are to be relegated to the evil category of of-
fensive weapons. The invasion of France by Germany
in 1914 reached its climax without the employment of
any of these weapons. The heavy gun is to be described
as "an offensive weapon." It is all right in a fortress;
there it is virtuous and pacific in its character; but bring
it out into the field — and, of course, if it were needed,
it would be brought out into the field — and it immedi-
ately becomes naughty, peccant, militaristic, and has to
be placed under the ban of civilisation. Take the tank.
The Germans, having invaded France, entrenched them-
selves; and in a couple of years they shot down 1,500,000
French and British soldiers who were trying to free the
soil of France. The tank was invented to overcome the
fire of the machine-guns with which the Germans were
maintaining themselves in France, and it saved a lot of
lives in clearing the soil of the invader. Now, apparent-
ly, the machine-gun, which was the German weapon for
holding on to thirteen provinces of France, is to be the
virtuous, defensive machine-gun, and the tank, which
was the means by which these Allied lives were saved,
is to be placed under the censure and obloquy of all just
and righteous men....

A truer classification might be drawn in banning weap-
ons which tend to be indiscriminate in their action and
whose use entails death and wounds, not merely on the
combatants in the fighting zones, but on the civil popula-
tion, men, women, and children, far removed from those
areas. There, indeed, it seems to me would be a direction
in which the united nations assembled at Geneva might
advance with hope....^*

490

Present discussions of qualitative arms control in some ways
are even more far-fetched than the interwar efforts which tried to
restrict offensive weapons and encourage defensive weapons. The
present efforts actually treat defensive weapons as more malign.
But, in any case, like the earlier efforts they vastly oversimplify
the problem by ignoring ambiguities that are intrinsic. Churchill's
comment that we'd be better off trying to restrict weapons that
are indiscriminate or that indiscriminately kill civilians is even
more applicable today.

A research reactor using natural uranium as a fuel might
serve as an aid in designing power reactors; or as a means of
accumulating and separating plutonium for producing plutonium
fuel for a civilian breeder reactor in the future; or as a means of
accumulating and separating plutonium for a nuclear explosive. A
nuclear explosive might be used to destroy an adversary's military
facilities or population centers; or to dig a canal. There have been
several clear-cut violations of agreements on the peaceful uses of
atomic energy and also violations of the nonproliferation treaty.
These have been known to other parties to the atomic energy
agreements, and in particular the United States government. And
they have also been known to the IAEA. Compliance has not been
pressed, nor in general has cheating been acknowledged for fear
of jeopardizing past or future agreements. Instead, ambiguities
have been used, even where interpretation is far-fetched, as
equivocations in order not to disturb the inertia of bureaucracies.

A large phased-array radar may be used to track space "junk"
or for early warning if it is placed near the periphery of a country
looking outwards towards a probable attacker; or it may be used
for battle management to guide interceptor missiles to destroy an
incoming ballistic missile. ABM may defend missile sites (which
MAD doctrine might be expected to regard as a good thing just as
shelter for a missile is supposed to be good); or it might be used
to defend population (which MAD doctrine supposes to be bad,
just as it supposes civil defense shelters to be bad). During the
negotiations for the ABM treaty there were some internal papers
within the U.S. government proposing that defense against
ballistic missiles might be permitted, but limited to missile sites
remote from cities — in the Soviet Union west of the Urals and in
the United States east of the Rockies. This was rejected in internal
debate because it was said that even such circumscribed site
defense remote from cities might conceivably be extended and
thickened so as to defend populations though such an extension

491

and thickening would take many years and would be quite visible.
But the ABM treaty went to great lengths to make certain that
no development, testing or deployment of an ABM other than a
quite trivial deployment on a single site would be allowed. As
anticipated, that destroyed any strong incentives on the American
side to carry out a vigorous research and development program
on ballistic defense of any sort. But not on the Soviet side. Nor
did it stop the Soviets from deploying radars at Krasnoyarsk
which almost certainly are likely to have a battle management
capability.

To compensate for the restraint on active defense in ABM
missile sites, SALT I relied on restraining the dimensions of the
silos so as to limit the number of Soviet heavy missiles, and so,
it was thought, their capacity to destroy our ICBMs. (They used
techniques for launching that ignited the booster after the missile
had been expelled from the silo and so were able to fit heavier
missiles in the silo.) In any case, a limitation on the size of missiles
did not prevent their increasing the precision of missiles and so in
this way gaining the ability to destroy our missile sites. In short,
SALT I did not prevent an active Soviet research and development
program on ABM and it did not prevent their increasing their
offensive capability so as to make our fixed land-based force
obsolete. (See Appendix B.)

The Advocates of Arms Agreements Based on AMD Prefer Arms
Agreements of Indefinite Duration Because They are Harder to Alter
Even When Circumstances Alter

Agreements that do not terminate automatically at a given
time are hard to terminate at all, even when wisdom suggests
they should be ended because changes in the state of the art
unanticipated in drafting the agreement or Soviet infringements
of the agreement make it obsolete. Given the intrinsic difficulties
of anticipating technical change and the especially poor record
of arms controllers in making such predictions, it is essential that
any serious agreement be limited in duration if we are to avoid
serious instabilities.

492

APPENDIX A

Returning from the Paris negotiations, Churchill reflected
on what he saw as the folly of premature disarmament, and on
October 25, 1928, during a speech in his constituency, he told
what he called a 'disarmament fable.' The tale was as follows:

Once upon a time all the animals in the Zoo decided that
they would disarm, and they arranged to have a confer-
ence to arrange the matter. So the Rhinoceros said when
he opened the proceedings that the use of teeth was
barbarous and horrible and ought to be strictly prohib-
ited by general consent. Horns, which were mainly de-
fensive weapons, would, of course, have to be allowed.
The Buffalo, the Stag, the Porcupine, and even the little
Hedgehog all said they would vote with the Rhino, but
the Lion and the Tiger took a different view. They de-
fended teeth and even claws, which they described as
honourable weapons of immemorial antiquity. The Pan-
ther, the Leopard, the Puma and the whole tribe of small
cats all supported the Lion and the Tiger. Then the Bear
spoke. He proposed that both teeth and horns should be
banned and never used again for fighting by any ani-
mal. It would be quite enough if animals were allowed
to give each other a good hug when they quarrelled.
No one could object to that. It was so fraternal, and that
would be a great step towards peace. However, all the
other animals were very offended with the Bear, and the
Turkey fell into a perfect panic.

The discussion got so hot and angry, and all those ani-
mals began thinking so much about horns and teeth and
hugging when they argued about the peaceful intentions
that had brought them together that they began to look
at one another in a very nasty way. Luckily the keepers
were able to calm them down and persuade them to go
back quietly to their cages, and they began to feel quite
friendly with one another again.

Quoted in Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, Vol. V, 1922-1939
(Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1977).

493

APPENDIX B:

Ambiguities and the Soviet Destruction of SALT I

Part of the problem of arms control is, first, that every military
weapon or weapons system can be used for several functions, and,
second, that any specific function can be performed in several ways
by various alternative military systems. These two difficulties
have affected our negotiators and our actual agreements. The first
difficulty has operated as a broad constraint on the United States,
leading us to forego the development and deployment of systems
with several useful and in some cases extremely important
military functions in order to make sure that the noxious function
is banned. We have interpreted the constraints upon ourselves
very broadly.

The second difficulty, namely that a function can be performed
by several military systems, has operated so as at most to keep
the Soviets from using only one specified way of performing the
banned function, but leaving them free to adopt several other
alternatives for doing so. We have interpreted the constraints on
the Soviets very narrowly, making it possible for them to defeat
the overt purpose of the agreement. And that is what they have
done.

Both difficulties are illustrated in SALT I. First, we surrendered
the important possibility of actively defending the missile silos — a
purpose which both sides agreed would be legitimate — because
we thought that such defenses might be amplified to perform
another function, that of defending population, even though this
sort of transformation could hardly have been done without easy
detection. For the second difficulty, we cut off one way for the
Soviets to destroy our Minuteman silos, but left other ways open
for them to develop a formidable array of silo destroyers, and so
defeated the major purpose of the agreement.

SALT I

Language worked out in Helsinki probably assures ad-
equate protection against any increase in the number
of missiles in the SS-9 class; but it is nonetheless a bit
vague and incomplete, lacking, for example, a definition
of what constitutes a 'heavy' missile. The Soviets were
determined to keep it that way. And they did. Still, any
violation of the spirit of this language, let alone the let-

494

ter, would probably oblige the United States to withdraw
from the agreements. Moscow understands that.

John Newhouse's account, which is quoted above, of how the
American negotiators of SALT I regarded the probable response
of the U.S. to Soviet violations of the spirit of the SALT I offense
agreement is accurate. Newhouse also correctly reports what
the U.S. delegation thought the Soviets believed we would do.
Unfortunately the delegation was wrong on both counts. The
Soviets violated the letter and above all the spirit and purpose of
the agreement. They anticipated apparently that the U.S. would
not withdraw. And the U.S. has not withdrawn.

The offense agreement and the Treaty on Anti-Ballistic Missile
Defense were supposed to complement each other. For the ABM
treaty to be viable, the offense agreement had to work, or better,
be replaced by a treaty that could accomplish at least the same
thing more desirably. The ABM treaty limited any defense against
ballistic missile attack to trivial levels. Moreover it limited not only
ballistic defense of cities, in accordance with the ideology of MAD
which regards killing people as good and defending people as
bad (to use language which Newhouse has also faithfully quoted
in describing the beliefs of the U. S. delegation). It also limited the
defense of Minutemen missile sites against Soviet ballistic missile
attack.

On the face of it that last limitation seems cockeyed, even
if one were to accept the simpleminded theory of stability held
by advocates of MAD: They believe that killing weapons is bad,
just as killing people is good; therefore defending weapons is
supposed to be good and "stabilizing." However, the advocates
of MAD were so bent on preventing the defense of population
against missile attack that they drastically limited the defense
of Minutemen missile sites so as to exclude even the far-fetched
possibility that the site defense might be expanded secretly and
rapidly to include a thick defense of population throughout the
country. Such expansion of Safeguard ballistic missile defense of
Minuteman sites would have taken five to ten years and would
have been easily open to observation and interruption. Moreover,
it was possible to make that sort of breakout even more remote (as
some of us suggested at the time, even though we did not accept
the premises of MAD) by constraining the defense of missile sites
to regions east of the Urals and West of the Rockies which are
very far from population centers.

495

Instead of a site defense which could have been made
increasingly sophisticated over time, the negotiators of SALT
I proposed to defend the Minuteman (MM) sites by limitations
embodied in the offense agreement. These, it was believed, would
prevent any addition to the number of Soviet offense ballistic
missile warheads capable of destroying our MM silos. They
assumed that it was only the large yield five-megaton warheads
on the "heavy" SS-9 missiles which could destroy silos, and that
there were at the time only 924 of these warheads, three apiece
for each of the 308 SS-9 missiles in the silos we had counted by
satellite. Our negotiators, therefore, tried to accomplish this
purpose in the agreement by restricting the number of "heavy"
missile silos to 308.

There were lots of troubles with the assumptions underlying
the agreement which were easily exploited to defeat its purpose.
First, the accuracy of the missile is much more important than
the yield in destroying a small target like a silo. If we consider
only blast overpressure, an improvement in accuracy, in fact, is
worth roughly the cube of an increase in yield. An improvement
in accuracy by a factor of two offsets a decrease in yield by a factor
of eight; an improvement in accuracy by a factor of five offsets a
125-fold change in yield.

For some targets including silos, we must consider in addition
to the transient blast overpressure another factor, namely, the
duration of the impulse. Larger yield weapons have a larger
impulse and therefore are more than proportionately destructive.
However, even with this qualification, the importance of changes
in accuracy far exceeds that of differences in yield. The Soviets
did not need a five megaton warhead to destroy a MM silo. More
accurately delivered warheads could be lighter and smaller, and
of very much smaller yield. They could be carried on light missiles
or you could have many more than three such silo-destroyers on a
heavy missile.

The Soviets did improve their accuracy by a factor of five and
therefore a warhead of less than 100 kilotons could be as effective
as the SS-9 five megaton warhead. A "heavy" missile could carry
many more than three of the silo destroyers and so even could a
light missile.

Second, the constraint in the agreement applies to silos which
we can observe, not to the number of missiles which we cannot.
The Soviets have some missiles which are not in silos. They have
some missiles that can be reloaded into reusable silos. Some might

496

be fired not from silos, but from launchers concealed in wooded
areas or under sliding roofs.

Third, even for warheads of substantial yields, constraints on
silos are quite inadequate for imposing limitations on the number
of warheads. We don't know how to monitor the yield and
numbers of reentry vehicles so we might think of restricting throw
weight. But we don't know how to do that directly either, so we
might think of restricting the volume of the missile. But even here
the delegates failed to observe what was plain at the time, that the
Soviets could squeeze larger missiles into silos of a given size if,
instead of igniting the booster in the silo, they expelled the missile
first from the silo, and then ignited it. That is the way we launch
missiles from submarine tubes. In fact, the Soviets exploited these
"cold launch" techniques, as some of us predicted. They squeezed
much "heavier" SS-18s into SS-9 size silos and they squeezed
much heavier missiles into SS-11 size silos that we had taken as
the standard for defining a "light missile silo," as differentiated
from a "heavy missile silo."

The Russians refused to define a heavy missile silo. (That
should have given us a hint as to their behavior under the Treaty.)
We stated what we understood it to be, and said that any new
silos that were 10-15 percent larger in dimensions would violate
the agreement. There was a great deal of vagueness and confusion
in our definition. The 10 percent, of course, was not operative. In
talking of 10-15 percent, it is obvious that only the 15 percent could
operate as a constraint. (The 10 percent was like the 50 percent in
advertisements of fire sales with discounts of up to 50 percent.)
But the initial phrasing of our understanding did not make clear
as to whether the 15 percent applied to the length or the cross-
sectional area or the volume, that could make a difference between
a 15 percent and 50 percent increase in volume. Moreover in
testimony before the Senate on SALT I, it was clear that there were
differences among principal negotiators as to what that constraint
meant.

But it is unnecessary to focus on the detailed ambiguities in
the letter of our "unilateral understanding" or in the letter of the
main body of the agreement itself. The gist of the matter is that
the Soviets exploited these ambiguities so as to vastly increase the
number of their warheads capable of destroying our MM silos.
The SS-19 which counts as a light missile, for example, has three
times the throw weight of the SS-11 which was supposed to be the
standard for a light missile! It has six accurate reentry vehicles

497

and warheads capable of destroying MM silos, compared to the
three in the "heavy" SS-9. The SS-18 has ten.

The upshot of these changes is that the SS-18 missiles and the
SS-19 missiles in silos now have nearly six times as many warheads
capable of destroying Minuteman as the 924 MIRVs in the 308
SS-9 missiles which our negotiators thought were the threat to
Minuteman. The language at Helsinki did not "assure adequate
protection against any increase in the number of missiles in the
SS-9 class."

In short, whatever the details, the Soviets defeated the principal
purpose of the agreement on offensive missiles. They violated the
spirit in a quite material sense. The U.S. did not feel obliged to
withdraw. And the Soviets were not wrong in anticipating that we
would not withdraw, that they could defeat the overt purpose of
the agreement with impunity. They predicted our behavior better
than we did.

ENDNOTES - The Wohlstetters - On Arms Control

1. Many present-day advocates of permanent treaties based
on MAD have been unable to predict technical changes or their
strategic consequences or even their own strategic views six
months in advance: they switched from advocating in 1957 in
the Gaither Report a huge program for civil and active defense
including the defense of populations against ballistic missile
attacks, on the ground that it would increase stability, to the other
extreme some six months later, that maintaining even a modest
defense of population would be destabilizing.

2. "Statement in Support of the ABM Treaty," National
Campaign to Save the ABM Treaty, 1324 Connecticut Avenue,
NW, Washington, DC, p. 1. See also, the conclusions on page 37
of their "Report on the Impact of U.S. and Soviet Ballistic Missile
Defense Programs on the ABM Treaty."

3. Quoted in William Manchester, The Arms of Krupp, 1587-
1968, Boston, MA: Little Brown and Company, 1964 [1968], p.
342.

4. Ibid., p. 343.

5. Navy Captain Schussler, "The Fight of the Navy Against
Versailles, 1919-1935" in Trials of War Criminals before the Nurnberg

498

Military Tribunals, Vol. X, Washington, DC: USGPO, 1951, pp. 433-
465.

6. John W. Wheeler-Bennett, The Nemesis of Power: The German
Army in Politics,1918-1945, 2nd ed., London, UK: MacMillan &
Co.; New York: St. Martin's Press, 1964, p. 40.

7. Paul Johnson, Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to
the Eighties, New York: Harper & Row, 1983, p. 171.

8. Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, The Prophet of Truth,
Vol. V, 1922-1939, Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1977, pp. 304-
305.

9. Wheeler-Bennett, op. cit., p. 185-186.

10. A. C. Temperley, The Whispering Gallery of Europe, London,
UK: Collins, 1938, pp. 221-222.

11. Quoted in Martin Gilbert, op. cit., p. 445.

12. Abram Chayes, "An Inquiry into the Writings of Arms
Control Agreements," Harvard Law Review, Vol. 85, No. 905, 1972,
p. 911.

13. U.S. Foreign Policy for the 1970s, a report to the Congress by
the President, May 3, 1972, p. 232.

14. Chayes, op. cit., p. 936.

15. "[T]he Russian procedure showed bad faith. Their test
series was so elaborate that it must have been prepared for
many months, perhaps longer. It is likely that they had started
preparations by March when the test ban conference reconvened
in Geneva; thus they negotiated for six months in bad faith. They
did so at the time when we were showing most clearly by our
attitude and proposals at Geneva that we were sincerely interested
in the test ban...." Hans Bethe, "Nuclear Testing," lecture, Cornell
University, January 5, 1962.

16. Chayes, op. cit., pp. 937-338.

499

17. Interview with Yevgeniy Velikhov, vice president of the
U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences, Moscow Radio in English to North
America, May 26, 1984, 2300 GMT, FBIS Daily Report: Soviet Union,
June 6, 1984, p. AA 12.

18. Winston S. Churchill, Speech to the House of Commons,
May 1932, in The Gathering Storm, Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin,
1948, pp. 71-72.

500

Arms Control That Could Work (1985)

Albert Wohlstetter and Brian G. Chow

Op-ed, Wall Street Journal, July 17, 1985, p. 28. Courte-
sy of the Wall Street Journal, the Wohlstetter Estate, and
Brian G. Chow. This op-ed summarizes Wohlstetter and
Chow's Self-Defense Zones in Space, a study for Integra-
ted Long-Term Defense Strategy in partial fulfillment of
MDA903-84-C-0325, Marina del Rey, CA: PAN Heuris-
tics, July 1986, available from www.albertwohlstetter.com/
writings/SelfDefenseZones.

The House has voted for a fiscal 1986 moratorium on U.S.
testing of anti-satellite weapons (ASATs) against objects in space
unless the Soviets resume their testing. The Senate version permits
such tests. This week a conference committee will try to resolve
this difference. The pious insincerities of Capitol Hill suggest
the issue is to avoid militarizing the untouched heavens. But the
U.S. and U.S.S.R. will use and have used space for 25 years to
further their rival political and military ends. Over 70 percent of
Soviet satellites are purely for military purposes. Many of the rest
are for both military and civilian uses. In fact, even the House
measure aims to encourage an agreement with the Soviets that
would protect the many satellites that supply reconnaissance,
warning, communications, navigation and guidance, and other
critical information for the defense of the two superpowers and
their allies. Can an agreement do that?

Some agreement with the Soviet Union conceivably could
help the U.S. protect the functioning of key military satellites. But
it will take a fresh approach. The standard sort of ASAT ban that
is supposed to be a way of defending satellites would very likely
end by preventing the U.S. from protecting them. Then many (not
all) proponents of the treaty would ignore its disastrous failure
to accomplish its purpose of helping satellites survive. They
would instead celebrate the survival of the treaty. If that seems
cynical, it shouldn't. That's essentially the story of the offense
and defense controls imposed by SALT 1 as a way of ensuring the
second-strike capability of U.S. intercontinental ballistic missiles.
These controls ended up ensuring that the U.S. could not defend
Minuteman silos and that the Soviets would be able to eliminate
them. (They deployed nearly six times as many silo-destroying

501

warheads as U.S. negotiators expected.) Many proponents of the
SALT I defense and offense restrictions celebrated SALT I as "the
jewel in the crown" of arms control. Well, it's clear that the jewel
was lost or stolen, if it was not paste in the first place.

More Than One Potential Use

The problem is that almost every military system has more
than one potential use, and every prohibited military function can
be performed in more than one way — often by permitted military
systems or even by systems in civilian use. Satellites can be anti-
satellites. So can devices that defend satellites. So, with changes in
their guidance logic, can ICBMs and submarine-launched ballistic
missiles. (In fact, the Soviets use ICBMs to launch their current
ASAT interceptors.) Ban everything that can be used against
satellites, and you might end up with no strategic offense ballistic
missiles. And no satellites. Yevgeny Velikhov, vice president of
the U.S.S.R. Academy of Science, is disturbingly reassuring on
this: "If we can dock with a satellite, then clearly we can dock with
an American satellite, but a bit carelessly, and thus destroy it. But
the idea of our proposal is that there is no problem in verifying
whether or not a satellite has been destroyed."

Verifying that U.S. satellites have already been destroyed in
a surprise attack might be no problem. And recording that fact
could help future historians, if any. However, it would hardly
enable the U.S. to prevent the surprise attack.

Even complaining to the usual sluggish Standing Consultative
Commission about suspicious satellites hovering near the U.S.'s
own, or U.S. threats to renounce an ASAT ban, would not prevent
a Soviet surprise attack. In fact a complete ASAT ban would
fatally hamper acts of self-defense. To prevent a surprise attack
on American satellites, the U.S. will need to respond in time
with a combination of passive and active measures: hardening,
maneuver, decoys, replenishment and jamming or destruction of
enemy ASATs. For, just as ships at sea are liable to sudden attack
by other ships staying close to them in peacetime, so critical U.S.
satellites will be vulnerable to a simultaneous raid by apparently
benign satellites pre-positioned to act as "space mines." Space
mines exploit the time delays inherent in defense.

We propose a space agreement to facilitate unilateral defense
against surprise attack on satellites. It resembles (but only slightly)
the existing U.S. and Soviet agreement on Prevention of Incidents

502

On and Over the High Seas. Its basic idea is to specify a number of
separate "Self-Defense Zones" for Western and Soviet satellites.
Each side would have the right to inspect, expel or otherwise
render harmless any invaders (should they exceed a safe number)
moving through these zones.

Each could do so, of course, without harming any life, military
or civilian. Unlike the agreement on Incidents at Sea that the
Soviets violated during their search for the wreckage of KAL 007,
this one would have automatic enforcement.

The Self-Defense Zones arranged for satellites would vary
with their different orbits, since satellites differ in their orbital
characteristics and some orbits are more densely populated than
others. Here, we sketch only the agreement for the important
geosynchronous orbits. The West has some 20 military and 30
civilian communication satellites in such orbits, and the Soviet
Union a growing number. In the future, for an adversary to reach
geosynchronous orbits (some 36,000 kilometers high) with hit-
to-kill vehicles launched from the Earth's surface would be a
slow business, taking over an hour. It would be especially hard
for them to confidently manage a simultaneous raid on a sizable
fraction of critical Western communication satellites. On the other
hand, launching hit-to-kill vehicles (or other ASAT weapons)
from satellites pre-positioned near the targeted satellites would
leave almost no time for defense. But defense needs time. The
West has yet to take this serious threat adequately into account.

Instead of attaching self-defense zones to satellites, advantage
can be taken of the fact that geosynchronous satellites circuit
the Earth roughly as it rotates and so appear almost stationary.
Negotiators might designate, for example, 36 zones — bands 10
degrees wide and 7,400 kilometers across with 12 each for the
West, the Warsaw Pact and neutral nations. Each zone would
rotate with the Earth. Current and future satellites would enter
the other side's zones at their peril. Satellites, once declared dead
or uncontrollable, would be subject to the other side's disposal
when they enter the other side's zones. Enforcing the agreement by
defending one's satellites would not therefore involve abrogating
it. Self-defense would be part of the agreement. The agreement
would not replace unilateral defense. (Nothing will.) Rather, it
would facilitate defense.

503

The cost of this would be low compared with its potential
advantage . Initially, each side would need only to reposition a small
number of its satellites that now happen to be in the other side's
zones. Afterward, a small number of satellites stationed near the
zone boundaries would require only occasional orbital adjustments
to avoid slow drifting into the other's zones. Moreover, up to
two live satellites could be permitted in the other's geostationary
zones at any given time. This would reduce the frequency of those
orbital adjustments and allow satellite operations (such as initial
placement and subsequent repositioning, as well as inspection
and collection of information about the other side's satellites) to
be performed with few restrictions. At the same time, the small
number of allowable transits would make simultaneous attacks
much more difficult.

Unique Opportunity

Important Western navigation satellites at near semi-
geosynchronous altitudes between 19,800 and 21,100 kilometers
are already separated from Soviet navigation satellites orbiting
more than 500 kilometers below them. Each side now orbits six to
twelve of these satellites. Each is likely to double these numbers in
the next few years in order to keep several visible at any given time
for use by ships, aircraft and other vehicles requiring extremely
precise navigation and guidance. An agreement would formalize
this separation for purposes of self-defense.

This is the kind of agreement the U.S. should be discussing
with the Soviets. A government concerned about protecting its
satellites would want to use such measures of self-defense in any
case. Negotiating for such an agreement would make apparent the
mutual adjustments in peacetime deployments that would facili-
tate self-defense. The U.S. could benefit whether the negotiation
failed or succeeded. Preparing and negotiating an agreement that
includes enforcement would also offer a unique opportunity to
inform domestic and allied publics (and allied leaders) of the
intrinsic troubles that plague democratic governments (including
the Reagan administration) in the standard agreements. Candor
about these matters is urgent and is more easily feasible in the
context of the design of a serious agreement aimed at coping with
such problems explicitly. When our leaders are less than candid
on these matters, they trap themselves. Being "serious" about
arms control should not mean being unserious about restraining

504

Soviet behavior and energetic only about preventing a U.S.
response. The ASAT ban, pushed by zealots for Mutual Assured
Destruction, would paralyze the West, not the East. It would not
verifiably prevent Soviet anti-satellite actions. It would prevent
the U.S. from effectively defending its satellites.

Messrs. Wohlstetter and Chow are director of research and senior
research speciaUst, respectively, at PAN Heuristics, a Los Angeles-area
policy research firm.

505

V. TOWARDS DISCRIMINATE DETERRENCE

507

Commentary: Towards Discriminate Deterrence
Stephen J. Lukasik

Events in the 1950-1970 period shaped the nation's under-
standing of nuclear forces and added an experimental dimension
to the interaction between the theory and practice. The interplay
of external events with the structure and details of strategic forces
was central at this early period, as both the United States and the
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) sought to understand
the capabilities and challenges of nuclear weapons and to
incorporate these weapons into national strategies.

During the first of these events, in the fall of 1950 when the
People's Republic of China (PRC) intervened in North Korea, the
United States considered the use of nuclear weapons to destroy
the bridges over the Yalu River, but the tactical situation was too
fluid for strike planning and delivery to be accomplished. Strikes
against Chinese cities in Manchuria were seen as an unacceptable
risk. Similar circumstances prevailed when the French asked for
military assistance from the United States at Dien Bien Phu in 1954,
but nuclear strikes against the rapidly closing perimeter would
have decimated the defenders as well. This nuclear planning
situation was played out 14 years later in the defense of Khe Sanh
in 1968. By this point, apart from collateral damage to defenders,
there was the issue of escalation in the face of substantial Soviet
nuclear weapons and a now-nuclear PRC. In the case of Suez in
1956, U.S. strategic forces were put on alert but concerns over the
possibility of intemperate action by Nikita Khrushchev leading
to accidental war provided new appreciation of the downsides
of nuclear weapons. Escalation control in Lebanon in 1958 was
central to all alerting of nuclear forces, their movements, and
attendant public statements. Cuba in 1962 illustrated in detail how
actions by nuclear-armed states to secure strategic advantages
could escalate to the point of unintended nuclear war. During the
attack on the Liberty by Israel in 1967, U.S. carrier-based aircraft
dispatched to its assistance were called back personally by the
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Secretary of Defense
because the aircraft were armed with nuclear weapons and their
intentions could have been misinterpreted by the USSR. This
same situation was avoided in the Pueblo attack by North Korea in
1968 only because all U.S. aircraft in South Korea that could have
intervened were nuclear armed and remained on the ground.^

509

While easy to view as a series of theoretical exercises, depen-
dent on cost-benefit analyses, damage optimization, competitive
advantage gaming, strategic balance calculations, and other
technical factors, strategy is, in practice, experimental in nature and
has features in common with biological evolution. The problem of
strategy, as Albert Wohlstetter realized, was not optimization of
a static system of forces but one of understanding their dynamics
over time.

Lacking a calling to pursue technology as a weapon-developer
or to employ its firepower as a weapon-wielder, Albert had spent
his undergraduate and graduate years steeping in logic and data
analysis, and his early professional years grappling with failures
of technology to deliver on their promises — experiences which
later distinguished him from many of his peers. Arms limitation
negotiations that resulted in the Limited Test Ban Treaty in 1963
and the Nonproliferation Treaty in 1968 emphasized that limiting
the potential damage from the downsides of nuclear technology
was at least as important as realizing its power. ^ Thus limiting
collateral damage, both physical and political, seeking stability
between nuclear-armed states, and minimizing the risks of
accidental war became central features of his strategic thinking.

Technology and Strategy

Albert was intensely interested in new technology. He
extrapolated from how the new nuclear technology changed war-
fare and strategy, to an examination of other areas of technology
that could have comparable impacts. It is this extrapolation that
characterizes the papers discussed here.

Albert viewed technology as offering what became a favorite
word of his, alternatives. The process began when he joined RAND
and started his extensive work on the basing of bombers and their
survivability. In a conversation years later, he noted potential
points of failure in the alarm systems that activated bomber
crews on strip alert, underlining his detailed concern with critical
command and control procedures. During this period, two
technological explorations at RAND sharpened his appreciation
for the opportunities in command and control they offered. The
first was a report in 1946, by a group of 18 in RAND's Missile
Division, providing detailed technical studies of earth satellites,
which were critical for reconnaissance and global communication.^
The second came in 1960-64, when Paul Baran and two coworkers

510

proposed a technology for survivable strategic communication
based on digital packet technology.* In discussions, Albert
often returned to the significance of this technology for strategic
communication. This rationale was, in fact, dominant in the
funding of the development and deployment of an experimental
prototype network, the ARPANET, which I had a role in later in
the decade.

These developments are mentioned briefly in the first of
Albert's papers in this section of the edited volume.^ The paper
opens by asking, "In what ways will technical change alter the
interests that join or divide various nuclear and non-nuclear
countries, and how will it alter the likely outcomes of potential
conflicts among them? In particular, how will new techniques
transform the interest and ability to project strength to distant
places, and so the worth of nuclear and non-nuclear commitments
there?" Of particular note is his raising the question of the relative
value of nuclear and conventional weapons.

Future Conflict

By the late 1960s, the Vietnam conflict stimulated rethinking
on the circumstances in which U.S. forces would be committed
to combat in the future. While World War II and Korea were
"conventional" except for the Hiroshima-Nagasaki interlude in
1945, Cuba was a purely nuclear confrontation, with little room
for conventional force considerations. But Vietnam added a
new dimension to "conflict space." Nuclear weapons had been
considered twice for use there, but their effects did not comport
with tactical circumstances. The jungle environment precluded
large ground force actions. There were no front lines on a map
to measure progress in achieving war aims. What was needed
was to locate fleeting targets undistinguishable from the neutral
background, to interdict distributed bicycle-based supply lines,
to deal with an enemy who occupied not only the surface but
the subsurface as well, and to minimize collateral damage to
the noninsurgent population. These issues challenged military
thinking and the technical innovators who had served the United
States so well in the past.

In an attempt to close such capability gaps, U.S. laboratories
worked closely with the Department of Defense (DoD) to
accelerate needed developments and move them into the theater.

511

The Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) established an office
for Southeast Asia, and Military Assistance Command- Vietnam
(MACV) was provided with a Science Advisor to define new
military needs for the technical community, to suggest how
technology could assist operations, and to coordinate trials of
new equipments when they arrived.

Many avenues were pursued to improve the effectiveness
of U.S. forces. Attempts were made to increase the precision of
weapons through wire-guidance, radio-control, and laser target
designators. All had their successes but none fully provided the
capabilities needed. The war against a few rapidly moving targets
embedded among many non-targets was too different from
prior military actions. Fixed targets such as roads and bridges
were easily reparable and the necessary labor and materials
were widely available. Targets consisted of relatively low value
components distributed at low densities over large areas. Heavy
vegetation obscured both air and ground reconnaissance and
impeded communication.

On returning from a tour as Science Advisor to General
Creighton Abrams, Fred Wikner proposed to the Advanced
Research Projects Agency (ARPA) and Defense Nuclear Agency
(DNA) a study of R&D needs to address what were seen as major
and long-lasting changes in military affairs. The study, eventually
named the Long Range Research and Development Planning
Program (LRRDPP), took as its starting point that nuclear parity
existed between the United States and the USSR, but that deterring
a wider range of more limited Soviet challenges must be addressed,
particularly at low levels of conflict.* In Albert's terms, these were,
in contrast to nuclear strikes, realistic contingencies to be addressed.
Five categories were considered: (1) Soviet participation in wars
between other nations; (2) Soviet aggression against nations
peripheral to the USSR; (3) Soviet aggression against a single
NATO nation; (4) Soviet aggression against NATO as a whole;
and (5) selective Soviet threats against specific targets in the U.S.
homeland. The second and third categories had been neglected
in then-current political-military planning but would become a
foundation for establishing future military requirements.

The methodology employed was to examine selected
contingencies in great detail, detail sufficient to understand
the forces driving the conflict and to develop requirements for
technologies and systems that offered the greatest expectation of
containing, and thus deterring, the threat. These contingencies

512

were: an attack on Norway arising from a Soviet military exercise;
an attack on Iran by Soviet and Iraqi forces; a ground and air attack
on Yugoslavia by forces from Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria;
and a Soviet invasion of Japan to seize Hokkaido by air, airborne,
and amphibious forces again starting from a military exercise. In
all these cases, the Soviet objective was to advance rapidly before
defensive forces could be mobilized. Several historical cases were
also examined, including the Cuban crisis of 1962 and Linebacker
II aerial raids on Hanoi in 1972.

The analyses proceeded by identifying military and industrial
target sets intended to inflict the greatest damage with minimal
forces in a short but decisive time. In all cases the "dual criteria"
of killing targets and leaving nontargets undamaged were
applied. Defensive weapons systems were of two types: precision
conventional weapons and subkiloton nuclear munitions.

The program was organized into three panels supported by
four industrial contractors to contribute expertise and advanced
concepts in ground, air, and naval warfare, conventional and
nuclear munitions, reconnaissance, command and control, and
system integration. Albert chaired the strategic alternatives
panel, Don Hicks the advanced technology panel, and Jack
Rosengren the munitions panel. ^ Senior-level executives from
OSD and the Services participated in panel sessions. The team
members were selected for their in-depth knowledge as well as
their skill in working as a multidisciplinary group, combining
history, strategy, technology, military operations, and systems.
In addition to Albert's broad skills, his ability to synthesize the
essence of a problem and its solution and to communicate it to
senior executives and political leaders was invaluable.

For a person of Albert's inclination, it was a superb oppor-
tunity to be instructed in the latest emerging technologies by
these innovators, recreating his earlier RAND environment; to
understand what each technology was, and was not, useful for;
and to match offensive and defensive concepts with current
needs and, more importantly, with presumed future needs as
defined in a context of realistic relationships among nation states
ranging from the largest nuclear competitor to the smallest ally
or participant. It was a comprehensive military-strategic planning
study combining both breadth and depth.

The technological scope of the study matched its strategic
reach: precision-delivered ballistic and cruise missile warheads,
terminal sensors across the entire electromagnetic spectrum for

513

night and all-weather capability, low-yield shallow and deep-
earth penetrators, microelectronics, data links, artillery-delivered
warheads, rapid land and naval mining, and high-mobility
ground vehicles.*

Albert's role was critical in reorienting thinking in several
ways. Technical developers at the time focused entirely on killing
targets, not on avoiding killing nontargets. Conflict scenarios
were often sketchy, confined to whatever was adequate to
justify the intended technical task. Nuclear weapons were seen
as effective ways of delivering enormous firepower, with yield
making up for poor delivery precision and uncertainties in target
location and vulnerability. Development choices were often
guided by the issue du jour and the evolutionary plans of weapon
system suppliers and customers. Consequently new technology
of uncertain performance went to the end of the queue in favor
of what was familiar, always with the expectation that current
deficiencies were fixable and would be fixed. Emerging problems
also went to the end of their queue, overshadowed by the Fulda
Gap problem and SIOP execution. Albert made it clear that this
would simply not do. His quiet voice, distinguished demeanor,
and kindly smile as he demolished an ill-conceived argument left
many quietly embarrassed. Having gotten this far, Albert did not
allow the flock to stray.

Another role of Albert's was shaping external arguments
to support the direction the study was taking. The participants
were quite prominent in their own right, but years of avoiding
bureaucratic minefields had had its conditioning effect. Albert
provided the intellectual discipline to see issues posed in terms of
unrecognized future needs. More of the same was unacceptable
when the same was not working. Albert was the tailor who sought
to clothe the emperor.

The technological possibilities and their strategic impact
examined in the LRRDPP, though well-founded, might have gone
nowhere had they not been elevated for assimilation by higher
levels of government. The social network established under
the program, and its coverage of so many unexamined issues
and opportunities, were factors guiding subsequent decisions
to adopt "smart weapon" technology. Their introduction into
force structures had a profound impact on the nation's military
capability by the late 1980s. Since many of the innovations were
based on computing hardware and software, they led to technical
competitions with the Soviets where the United States had a

514

comparative advantage, a view compatible with the developing
concept of competitive strategies. While the subsequent story is too
long to examine here (it is recounted by Andrew May and Bartlett
Bulkley), the systems eventually developed first demonstrated
their effectiveness in Kuwait in 1991.

Backing Away from Massive Retaliation

What is important in the present context is the technical
ground the LRRDPP put under Albert's own thinking on the
questionable utility of nuclear weapons. Albert asked, "Must
we aim to kill noncombatants?" and "can we justify aiming our
nuclear weapons at civilians simply because they're easy to
reach and cheap to kill?"' He noted that "even if MAD were a
persuasive deterrent to a thoroughly rational decision-maker,
such rationality is hardly universal." Albert also quotes from the
Pacem in Terris Encyclical: "The [MAD] conflagration may be set
off by some uncontrollable and unexpected chance" and result in
"an unprecedented mass slaughter of unoffending civilians." He
concluded by pointing out that "in the long run, mutual threats to
kill innocent populations seem an especially poor way of building
a community of interests between the Soviet Union and the United
States."

Such arguments slowly impacted U.S. strategic targeting
doctrine. An early attempt was to offer the President a large num-
ber of strategic nuclear response options to a nuclear exchange.
They sought to use reduced numbers of weapons to "signal" in an
attempt to control and constrain a nuclear exchange. Of course, the
scaled-down options remained huge in absolute terms, reflecting,
say, a reduction from 1,000 to 500 thermonuclear warheads. The
scaled-down options were apparently based on the logic that a
smaller fraction of a poor idea might eventually become a good
idea.

In the 1980s, a new issue arose to which Albert responded, in
part for its own importance but also as an opportunity to continue
his assault on massive retaliation. This was the proposal for a new
technological approach to strategic defense, the strongly ridiculed
and ultimately rejected Star Wars concept.^" Albert used his
effective technique of pointing out the inconsistent, paradoxical,
or absurd consequences of the positions taken on both sides of
the argument, in this case a pastoral letter on war and peace
by American Catholic bishops. This approach has the effect of

515

clearing conceptual underbrush and defining the playing field.
In public policy debates, where there are always strong views
on both sides, it is not uncommon for all sides to start with their
own preferred solution, often arrived at on political, ideological,
theological, or even visceral grounds, and then to work backward
from it to establish a supporting case. It is a process that often leads
to logical difficulties highly vulnerable to Albert's "controlled
burn" approach to strategic forestry.

Reacting to a writer on strategy, Albert notes that espousing
massive retaliation while opposing the protection of one's people
amounts to saying, "Offense is defense, defense is offense. Killing
people is good, killing weapons is bad." Further, at the time he
wrote those words there were at least six nations possessing
nuclear weapons, and that "hardly anyone seriously expects
that each and everyone . . . that have made nuclear explosives
will destroy all their nuclear arms irretrievably and verifiably
in a future near enough to govern our present actions." Thus
alternative strategies were clearly in order. His prescription was
to "rely less on threats of nuclear destruction and much more
on improving conventional defenses; discourage the spread of
nuclear weapons; and continue making nuclear weapons less
vulnerable to attack, safer from 'accidental' detonation, and more
secure against seizure and unauthorized or mistaken use."

Conventional Weapon Ascendancy

The prescription set forth above segued directly to new and
unexploited technological opportunities. Since collateral damage
increases with inaccuracy, not only will "[ijmproved accuracies
make feasible greater discrimination as well as effectiveness in
the use of nuclear weapons," but "they also make possible more
extensive replacement of nuclear with conventional weapons,"
and thus greatly reduce unnecessary killing of bystanders. Albert
argued that, against a small fixed target, an improvement in
accuracy by a factor of 10 provided the same effectiveness as an
increase in yield by a factor of 1,000. Put another way, exploiting
the new technologies of precision allows drastic reduction in
nuclear yields, and even brings needed capabilities into the range
of conventional explosives. As John Foster once observed to me in
a discussion of silo hardness, "10 kilotons on the roof does it every
time." While not arguing for the complete replacement of nuclear
with conventional weapons, Albert maintained that the effect will

516

be to make it "more feasible to avoid crossing the divide between
conventional and nuclear weapons. They give us choices."

The next paper in this section, Albert's final aria in the MAD
opera, is an excerpt from Discriminate Deterrence, the report of the
Commission on Integrated Long Term Strategy (CILTS).^^ CILTS,
which Albert co-chaired with outgoing Undersecretary of Defense
for Policy, Fred C. Ikle, started its deliberations in 1986 and
published its report in early 1988. The opening paragraphs of the
excerpt echo many of Albert's concerns, the first mentioned being
technology, followed by basing, conventional arms in concert
with nuclear arms. Third World conflicts, and low-intensity high-
probability conflicts. It speaks to lesser powers acquiring advanced
weaponry. A "wider range of contingencies," "discriminating
non-nuclear force," "conventional and nuclear posture . . .
based on a mix of offensive and defensive systems," "survivable
communications and control of forces," and "discriminate
nuclear attacks," are all pure Wohlstetter. It asks, "Can NATO
rely on threats of escalation that would ensure its own destruction
(along with that of the Soviet Union) if implemented?" The report
broaches the possibility of economic collapse of the Soviet Union,
increasing proliferation of nuclear weapons, and insurgencies
and organized terrorism. It makes the case that gains in accuracy
strongly support the case for discrimination.

But it argues for a Third World strategy where a combat role
for U.S. armed forces is to be viewed as an "exceptional event."
Its encouragement of support for anti-communist insurgencies,
reflecting then current support in Afghanistan, misses the point
of what happens when such friends, having vanquished one
superpower, then turn on the other. The report worried greatly
about a growing Soviet role in the Third World, and it speaks
warmly of using Saudi bases. It points out the large disparity
between U.S. and Soviet procurement of major weapon systems,
the Soviet's increasing research, development, and testing
expenditures, their greater pace of satellite launches, and their
greater military capital stocks, compared to those of the United
States.

As is typical of "commission reports," it is a compromise
between sometimes opposing views, such as those of the
Wohlstetter canon and those of the Soviet-oriented defense
establishment. This is not to be critical. Even if the CIA had
opened its files to CILTS, it would not have helped. The CIA also
missed the impending dissolution of the USSR, which happened 2

517

years later. On the other hand, its plea for an integrated strategy is
probably more relevant and important now than when the report
was written. The Soviet Union did impose a degree of political
and intellectual coherency on U.S. national strategy. As many
security analysts have bemoaned, at least then we knew who the
enemy was. The current uncertainty of who and where the enemy
is has replaced the Cold War's simpler focus on what and when
to strike. The Commission's prescriptions are still sensible.

In the final paper of this section, Albert returns, 24 years
later, to the subject of his 1968 RAND publication dealing with
technology. ^^ In the interim a great deal of invention had occurred,
particularly with respect to conventional weapons, some traceable
to the LRRDPP in the early 1970s. A revolution had occurred in
the acquisition, storage, analysis, and distribution of information,
and these changes further shifted the balance from nuclear to
conventional weapons. Large nuclear weapons, seen as far too
large to be useful in realistic contingencies, now compete with
far more acceptable precision conventional weapons, augmented
by such technologies as stealth and networked battlefield sur-
veillance. The consummate nuclear strategist says, "The technical
changes [of the Information Revolution] are larger, and their
effects more ramified, more closely interconnected, and much
more important than the changes worked by fission and fusion."
Albert recognized that rapidly increasing accuracy enabled
by technology was far more important than the relatively slow
growth in yield.

The paper is an indicator of where Albert would have gone in
developing a strategy for precision weapons, networked military
operations, and ubiquitous surveillance, all comparable to his
earlier work in the 1950s on nuclear weapons. His difficulties
with nuclear weapons that are so large and powerful as to cause
as much damage to their user as to the targets have been noted
earlier. From the standpoint of the 15 years that have elapsed
since this presentation, the Information Revolution has gone far
beyond that which provided the basis for Albert's assessment of
the disutility of nuclear weapons. But he clearly appreciated that
what he was seeing in the evolution of conventional weapons
was only a start, and that many more evolutionary orders of
magnitude, some of which have now been realized, lie in store.

Albert speaks positively of the implications of the wide
dissemination of information, not only on the battlefield but
also in the world of social and political discourse and economic
development. He notes that decentralization results in competition

518

and establishes a basis for the spread of democratic processes
that can replace the more arbitrary and less stable decisions of
dictators.

Unexplored Downsides

In writing about the impacts of rapidly changing technology,
Albert had the benefit of demonstrated capabilities, such as
the development of the Internet, use of precision weapons in
Operation DESERT STORM, and the collapse of the closed USSR
in the face of vibrant open economies. But in part because he
died a few years later, he did not have an opportunity to learn
the downsides of the Information Revolution he was so enamored
of.

He appears unaware of some of the other results of computer
and communication-based networking. Computers and networks
can be penetrated by adversaries as easily as armor-piercing
ordnance can penetrate a tank. Malicious software can be
introduced into systems to subvert their intent, and their content
can be stolen or changed. Communication and sensing satellites
can be jammed, their uplinks captured, and they can be destroyed
in orbit. Networks can be saturated by computer-generated
traffic, and the practical and technical overhead of encryption and
access controls limit their wide adoption in real-time situations.
Software is a beautiful logical construct, but the systems based on
it are of such complexity that they defeat the full understanding
and control by their designers and operators. And in networking
all aspects of modern societies we create attractive new targets
capable of system-wide failures.

Albert's final assessment — that "man is the species that
can use information, reasoning, and insight to improve the
odds [of avoiding an apocalyptic end]" — may be optimistic. In
transforming nuclear confrontation to the domain of information,
we are returned to the stage of nuclear strategy at the beginning
of the Cold War. Albert was fortunate to be able to read the end
of the "book" he started 40 years earlier, though what might have
been the final chapter has not yet been written. Albert wanted
to extend the concept of deterrence to the realm of conventional
warfare. The Defense Nuclear Agency's New Alternatives Panel
was one way to keep the idea alive, and some were considering
a CIOP, a Conventional Integrated Operational Plan based on a
one-to-one relation between a smart warhead and a pre-identified
target.

519

The Spread of Nuclear Disorder

While nuclear strategy emerged as Albert joined RAND, it is
far from its end as a domain of central importance to the security
of all nations. In 1950 the "nuclear problem" was one of managing
U.S. strategic nuclear forces. Today the corresponding nuclear
problem is that of "managing" a set of global nuclear powers, real
and "virtual," the latter reflecting the circumstance that nuclear
weapons and national nuclear forces not yet in being are as
worrisome as those that are.

The focus of nuclear concerns changed in Albert's closing
years. The collapse of the Soviet Union took the edge off the
U.S. -USSR nuclear confrontation. Although strategic force levels
did not change immediately, the shift to cooperation, even in
such sensitive matters as the safeguarding of Russian nuclear
materials, made much of past postures less relevant. Precision
conventional weapons were used on numerous occasions in
largely non-nuclear circumstances. Operation JUST CAUSE in
Panama in 1990, Operation DESERT STORM in 1991, and various
"peace operations" in Iraq, Somalia, Macedonia, Haiti, Bosnia,
and Kosovo provided numerous opportunities to hone doctrine
in the areas of precision weapons, net-centric operations, and
coalition warfare.

During this period where explicit nuclear confrontations
diminished, the global nuclear weapon landscape was "enriched"
by the emergence of new nuclear nations. While South Africa
dismantled its nuclear force in 1991, Iraq's nuclear program was
an active concern until 2003. India had exploded a "peaceful"
nuclear weapon in 1974 and both India and Pakistan announced
their full nuclear status with back-to-back nuclear test series
in 1998. Libya's nuclear ambitions were known, and it did not
terminate its program until 2003. North Korea was actively
pursuing nuclear weapons, with negotiations during this period
to limit its development activities ultimately unsuccessful when it
detonated a nuclear weapon in 2006. Iran, as early as the period of
the Shah, was on a path to nuclear power and, according to public
statements, intimated that nuclear weapons were a possible future
goal.

As the domain of nuclear strategy has shifted from the
management of credible deterrent forces in a two-sided balance,
the lessons painfully learned and the doctrines and strategies
put into place no longer suffice. Nuclear weapons have entered
a "commodity" period. Pakistan disseminated its weapon

520

technology as well as Chinese weapon designs. North Korea,
Iran, and Syria are engaged in mutually-supporting programs
in nuclear and missile technology. Industrial nations, despite the
strictures of the Treaty on the 'Non-proliferation of Nuclear Weapons
(NPT), provide technologies to would-be proliferators, some dual-
use, some the result of inadequate technology export controls,
and some simply illegal transactions. Non-nuclear signatories
to the NPT engage in clandestine weapon development despite
the efforts of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
Compliant signatories must reevaluate their options in the light
of each new nuclear nation."

One now parses the "nuclear problem" quite differently
than was the case in 1950 and in the following 40 years. There
are four aspects to the transformed problem. First is to reduce
the complexity of the scene by discouraging non-nuclear nations
from acquiring nuclear weapons, a matter addressed by the NPT,
though not entirely successfully in view of the observed rate of
one new country every nine years. The second is encouraging
responsible stewardship of their nuclear forces by nuclear nations,
an issue on which the NPT is silent. The third is devising a path for
the complete elimination of nuclear arsenals by nations possessing
them. While this is a stated goal of the NPT, it is terra incognita in
a policy sense. ^^ The fourth is preparing a global response in the
event that a nuclear weapon is detonated, whether by accident,
by unauthorized use, in an accidental nuclear war, or by explicit
intent.

Were Albert alive, he would delight in dissecting these issues
and nudging us in sensible directions.

Coda: Were Albert to read my introduction, I think he would be
pleased. But here is how his reaction to me would be.

He would make some mildly positive statement that would
amount to giving me an "A" for effort, or maybe just a "B+"
overall. Then he would point out the most egregious error in my
logic. There would be more errors in his mind, but he would be
too polite to enumerate them, and after all, he would be privately
pleased at the progress of a promising student.

521

ENDNOTES - Lukasik

1. William C. Yengst, Stephen J. Lukasik, and Mark A. Jensen,
"Nuclear Weapons That Went to War," SAIC report prepared for
the Defense Special Weapons Agency, DSWA-TR-97-25, October
1996.

2. There were a number of arms control agreements reached
in this period that reflected widespread concern over the growing
threats created by weapons of mass destruction. These included
the Antarctic Treaty in 1959, the Moon, Space, and Other Celestial
Bodies Treaty in 1967, the Latin America Nuclear Free Zone
Treaty in 1967, the Seabed Treaty in 1971, SALT I in 1972, the
Biological Warfare Treaty in 1972, the ABM Treaty in 1972, and
the Threshold Test Ban Treaty in 1974.

3. Preliminary Design of an ^experimental World-Circling Spaceship,
SM-11827, Santa Monica, CA: Douglas Aircraft Company's Project
RAND, May 2, 1946, available from www.rand.org/pubs/special_
memoranda/SM11827/.

4. For more on Paul Baran's work on survivable strategic
communications, see www.rand.org/about/history/baran.html.

5. Albert Wohlstetter, Strength, Interest and New Technologies,
opening address before The Implications of Military Technology in the
1970s, the Institute for Strategic Studies' ninth annual conference,
Elsinore, Denmark, September 28 to October 1, 1967, D(L)-16624-
PR, Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, January 24, 1968,
available from www.rand.org/about/history/wohlstetter/DL16624/
DL16624.html. The address was also published as Wohlstetter,
Strength, Interest and New Technologies, in The Implications of
Military Technology in the 1970s, Adelphi Papers No. 46, London,
UK: Institute for Strategic Studies, March 1968.

6. The program's name was, in part, chosen to result in
the unpronounceable acronym, one so long as to be dull and
forgettable, in contrast to most government program acronyms
that are chosen to be bold, inspiring, and self-defining, and
to encourage funding. In this case the intent was to minimize
attention until results were in hand.

522

7. The reports of the Panel on Remotely Piloted Vehicles,
Defense Science Board Summer Study, July 19-31, 1971, and Final
Report of the Task Force on Remotely Piloted Vehicles, August 1972,
were significant inputs to this work.

8. The output of the program exists only in difficult-to-
locate declassified documents. Two comprehensive summaries
are Summary Report of the Long Range Research and Development
Planning Program, draft final report prepared by D. A. Paolucci,
Falls Church, VA: Lulejian & Associates, Inc., February 7, 1975,
declassified by DNA on March 2, 1978; and Andrew May and
Bartlett Bulkley, The Pre-History of the Revolution in Military
Affairs, Unclassified Draft Report, McLean, VA: SAIC, Hicks and
Associates' Strategic Assessment Center, February 2004.

9. Albert Wohlstetter's remarks in "The Military Dimensions
of Foreign Policy," Fred Warner Neal and Mary Kersey Harvey,
eds.. Vol. II of four volumes edited from the proceedings of Pacem
inTerris III, National Convocation to Consider New Opportunities
for United States Foreign Policy, Washington, DC, 1973, Chap.
II, "The Debate on Military Policy: How Much is Enough? How
MAD is MAD?"

10. Albert Wohlstetter, "Bishops, Statesmen, and Other
Strategists on the Bombing of Innocents," Commentary, June 1983.

11. Discriminate Deterrence, report of the Commission on
Integrated Long-Term Strategy, co-chaired by Fred C. Ikle and
Albert Wohlstetter, Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing
Office, January 1988, available from www.alhertwohlstetter.com/
writings/DiscriminateDeterrence.

12. Albert Wohlstetter, "RPM, or Revolutions by the Minute,"
presented at a meeting at the American Enterprise Institute, June
10, 1992.

13. These issues are examined in a working paper by Stephen
J. Lukasik, "Dealing with the Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons:
Plan B," October 2007.

14. For a recent affirmation of this goal, see George P. Shultz,
William J. Perry, Henry A. Kissinger, and Sam Nunn, "A World
Free of Nuclear Weapons," The Wall Street journal, January 4,
2007.

523

strength, Interest and New Technologies (1968)
Albert Wohlstetteri

[Opening address before The Implications of Military
Technology in the 1970s, ninth annual conference of the
Institute for Strategic Studies, Denmark, September 28
to October 1, 1967] D(L)-16624-PR, Santa Monica, CA:
RAND Corporation, January 24, 1968, available from
www.rand.org/about/history/wohlstetter/DL16624/
DL16624.html. Courtesy of the Wohlstetter Estate.

In what ways will technical change alter the interests that join
or divide various nuclear and non-nuclear countries, and how
will it alter the likely outcomes of potential conflicts among them?
In particular, how will new techniques transform the interest and
ability to project strength to distant places, and so the worth of
nuclear and non-nuclear commitments there? What do they
suggest about the realities that will confront some American and
many European hopes for stable regional autarkies, including the
hopes of the new isolationists?

The Receding Technological Plateau

These are large and uncertain questions. They raise a prior
one: will there be major changes in military technology? During
much of the last decade many theorists have presumed a plateau
in the arts of nuclear offense and defense. They believed that a
protected strategic force was not endangered by future changes
in offense technology, that it would be threatened by a ballistic
missile defense, but that such defense fortunately was unfeasible.
Estimates of the unfeasibility of this supposedly destabilizing
measure bolstered arguments against any investment innew active
defense systems. But in fact major changes have been cumulating
in both offense and defense. The plateau was a mirage.

In the early 1950' s, estimates of the unfeasibility, and if feasible,
the lack of any strategic utility for the H-Bomb, had been used in

524

much the same way for an opposite end: to support arguments for
active defense and against a focus on offense. It is a minor irony
that many of the ardent defenders of defense in the 1950's are
among those most offended by it now. Nor can the conversion be
explained by changes in the technology.

In both the early 1950's and early 1960's, judgments on the
technology as well as its strategic consequences were faulty.
Fusion weapons were not merely feasible but had very large
implications for delivery systems, their protection and mode of
operation. And the 1960's have witnessed major changes in the
arts of offense and defense that will be operational in the 1970's.
Moreover, no simple hard and fast distinction divides the effects
on stability of offense and defense, making offense changes good
or innocuous and defense changes bad. The complexities are
particularly apparent if one looks at the consequences, not for a
hypothetical two-nation world, but for the real one with a great
many non-nuclear countries and a handful or so of countries with
nuclear weapons and grossly different resources and strategic
situations.

The impending widespread appearance of civilian reactors
is one of several important developments that will impose the
need for more complex and varied policies than relying solely on
international inspection against diversion of plutonium or simply
deterring direct nuclear attack on oneself. For civilian reactors
will greatly diffuse much of the essential material and knowledge
and so reduce the extra cost and time to acquire nuclear weapons.
By the end of the 1970's civilian reactors, on some official though
uncertain estimates, will have as by-product about 10,000 bombs'
worth of plutonium; in the following 20 or 30 years, perhaps
a million bombs' worth doubling every ten years. ^ Drafts of
nonproliferation and other arms control treaties specifically allow
for parties to the agreements to exercise their sovereign national
rights to withdraw, if on their own estimate extraordinary events
endanger their supreme interest.^ But policies that will keep this
estimate of danger low among non-nuclear countries will involve
responsible commitments on the part of at least some nuclear
countries to non-nuclear countries that feel subject to coercion.
Nuclear weapons will not make small and large powers equal,
but they will increase the possibility of mischief, particularly in
the coercion of non-nuclear powers.

The technological plateau in nuclear offense and defense has
been assumed wishfully by many who hoped for early extensive

525

disarmament and opposed the spread of nuclear weapons.
However, the supposed plateau also encourages advocates of
nuclear weapons in countries that do not now control them by
suggesting that a force of super-power quality is a static goal, that
it might be obtained at modest cost or perhaps by one supreme
effort, and that then it is possible to rest. It isn't.

Technologies relevant for nuclear war have reached no
flat level. They have been altering steeply, and affecting them
unevenly. And technologies affecting interests and capabilities
in classical engagements are changing too, significantly if less
suddenly.

Ill

Some Technical Changes

Rapid changes in finished military systems stem from
even more rapid changes in basic elements of these systems.
For finished systems affecting the conduct of classical wars, I
shall refer particularly to the large changes in communication,
in control systems, and in transport. In the nuclear field, I shall
refer to antiballistic missiles, to systems for gathering, processing
and transmitting timely data on adversary offense and defense,
and especially to the multiplication of armed offensive re-entry
vehicles carried in a single launch vehicle (MIRVs), and the great
improvements in offense accuracies and reliability. There are, of
course, other changes in military technology, some with related
implications, but the ones I have selected for brief analysis are
perhaps the most immediately significant.

First, however, the basic elements of finished systems.
Changes here, in themselves, make quite implausible the assump-
tion of a plateau in finished military systems. Take computers,
for example. They are essential instruments used in the process
of designing weapons systems or their elements, such as nuclear
warheads, and in designing logistics management for classical
wars. Computers are also critical components of the weapons
systems designed. They are essential parts of the airborne inertial
guidance systems that keep offensive missiles pointing at targets.
And they are parts also of the radars and defense missiles that
might be used to shoot them down. The computer art changes at
an extraordinary rate. Computers have and will become faster,
cheaper, and more reliable. While terminal ends, the input-output

526

units that mate the computer to its user, permit fewer economies
of scale and have improved much more slowly, the hardware for
the highly repetitive central processing and memory has been
multiplying in speed ten-fold every four years and costing only
one-tenth as much every four years or less. They took one-tenth as
much room after the last ten years and, in the next ten, they may
shrink by a factor of one thousand.*

These improvements in computers result in good part from
still more basic changes — massive changes in the art of solid
state and micro-electronics. Order of magnitude improvements
come even more swiftly in the tiny elements that form essential
parts of computers, sensing and communications systems. It has
been suggested that, as in nature, gestation periods shorten with
decreasing size; and sizes are decreasing very rapidly. It appears
now, for example, that it may be practical soon to pack as many
as one hundred thousand transistors on a quarter-inch wafer.
Such startling densities are promised by the techniques known
as LSI or "large scale integrated circuitry." The packing not only
cuts size, but perhaps more important, increases speed, and by
reducing the number of wafers and critical interconnections, may
vastly increase reliability and make new ranges of complexity
workable. By "discretionary wiring," even if fewer than a third
of the potential gates are working, paths of connection on the
wafer may take advantage of the many alternatives to detour
faulty gates. LSI and related techniques will affect almost every
phase of electronics and, ultimately, the shape of military offense
and defense systems. Antimissile systems, for example, greatly
advanced in recent years, may be expected to become still faster-
reacting and more effective for a given budget. Moreover, such
improvements tend to reinforce each other. Improved missile-
borne computers decrease guidance errors. Geodetic errors,
another important component of missile inaccuracy, diminish
with new basic data obtained by satellite. And satellites, of course,
supply much precise information about target systems. Lighter
guidance equipment and increases in explosive yield per pound
of payload make it possible to cut the size of a re-entry vehicle
that can destroy even resistant targets. This makes it possible in
turn to carry on each launch vehicle many armed re-entry vehicles
directed at widely separated targets.

The new technologies make it possible to do new things as
well as to do the old things more cheaply or better. And while
they make doing the old things accessible to more countries, this

527

does not mean closing the gap between the largest countries and
the smaller ones. In some respects they increase the disparity.
For instance, the tremendous improvements in satellite, sensing
and data processing technologies and reductions in their cost
make feasible world-wide information gathering facilities where
they were not possible at all before — but on a scale of resource
expenditure not likely to be undertaken by medium or smaller
size powers.

Transformations in finished system reliability, accuracy
and destructive payload may be less rapid than in the small
components of these systems: they are nonetheless impressive.
Roughly speaking, over about a decade — depending on where one
starts and how one measures the changes — failure probabilities
of missile guidance systems have decreased by a factor of ten or
more. So also has the resultant of intercontinental delivery errors
of all types. When combined with increases in the number of
armed re-entry vehicles carried in a launch vehicle, such order
of magnitude changes have large strategic consequences. For a
significant range of circumstances the number of weapons needed
to destroy a target varies essentially as the square of the delivery
inaccuracy and only as the two-thirds power of target resistance
or megaton yield. Improving accuracy ten-fold or increasing
yield 1,000-fold then amount to the same thing. To put this in
perspective, the shift from the largest high explosive bombs of
World War II to the Hiroshima fission weapon was roughly an
increase of 1 or 2 thousand in yield. The important improvements
in antiballistic missiles have been accompanied by less noticed
but in some ways more dramatic changes in the advanced offense
systems of the major powers.

Changes in Nuclear Offense and Defense

Discussions of "offense" in general compared with "defense"
in general yield slogans like "The best defense is a good offense"
or the reverse; but almost no understanding. Offense and defense
serve overlapping but partially distinct and important functions,
and adversaries differ. U.S. defense against a Chinese offense in
the 1970's or the viability of a French strategic force in the face
of Russian offense and defense are quite different matters from
the mutual relations of Russian and American strategic offense

528

and defense forces. Adversaries not only differ in resources, but
also in the state-of-the-art of offense or defense available to them
at any given time and in the marginal costs to buy and operate
a given offensive or defensive unit. Given the high research and
development and other capital costs of modern weaponry and the
so-called learning curve effects, the small forces in particular are
likely to have much higher unit costs than large ones. For such
reasons, the "exchange ratios" of attacking vehicles expended as
against those they can destroy, or the analogous offense to defense
"exchange ratios" of an increment in the cost of attacking vehicles
as against the extra cost of defense to knock down the attacking
vehicles, all need to be used with a caution seldom observed in
popular literature. In the space available here I can indicate only
a few essential implications of the recent and impending changes
for relations among the varied nuclear and non-nuclear nations.

First, an offense force with such increased accuracies and
reliabilities and with an extensive use of MIRVs is very much more
efficient in attacking the fixed offense force or the important fixed
elements of the mobile force of an adversary. For some relevant
circumstances which I shall illustrate, these offense improvements
can drastically reverse the ratios of attacking missiles to missiles
destroyed which in the hypothetical missile duels that fill the
strategic literature are always shown to disfavor the attacker.

Second, one result of this sort of change in Russian offense
forces is to make improved antiballistic missiles (rather than
simply more hardening or more missiles) an economic way for
the United States to protect the hard fixed elements of a strategic
force. More hardening is outpaced by the offense changes since
target resistance affects weapons requirements only as the two-
thirds power. Simply adding more vehicles is costly and more
destabilizing than an active defense of these hard points since
increasing vehicles also increases the capacity to strike first.

Third, at a minor increment in the modest cost of a hard
point ABM defense, it is possible to make available a light ABM
for defense of civil societies against a small submarine or land
based missile force or part of a large one launched by mistake or
without authorization.^ Its possessor can keep substantially free
of damage from a desperate small attack issuing out of a crisis
of escalation and can do this without starting nuclear war. By
protecting against desperate acts, it reduces the effect of desperate
threats, and so decreases the cost and increases the worth of
commitments to third countries — especially those doubtful of

529

their importance to the committed power. A light defense, as
Robert Oppenheimer perceived years ago, can also help stabilize
arms control arrangements against small non-signers or violators
of the arrangements. It would leave essentially untouched the
two principal powers' ability for major retaliation against each
other, even if they failed to make minor adjustments in their
offense. And, contrary to some claims, each of the major powers
is quite capable of assessing the difference between an actual thin
defense and a thick urban defense oriented effectively against
each other. Moreover, given the very large disparities in resources
available to the two largest powers on the one hand and to such
countries as China on the other, they can continue to preserve
offense capabilities against each other without an arms "spiral"
and without becoming nearly as vulnerable to attack by such
smaller powers. Arguments that an adversary is more likely to
respond to defense improvements than to an increase in offense
capability are implausible in general, and especially so as applied
to the Russians, who have said exactly the opposite many times
and have behaved as if they mean it. I agree with the Russians.
Moreover it does neither the Russians nor the Americans any
essential harm if each is defended against China, as they are now.
Even more obviously, I should think, it does no harm to a country
protected by the United States against Chinese nuclear threats if
the United States can execute its commitment more safely, and
hence more reliably. Relations of arms and arms control are
not two-person games in which improving the position of one
participant necessarily worsens that of the other.

Fourth, reliable mutual deterrence between the great powers
and reliable commitments to protect other countries, to be stable
in the face of changing technologies, cannot be technologically
static. Trying to stop qualitative change would be like King
Canute commanding the waves. Qualitative improvement does
not, however, entail — in the uncritical stock phrase — an "ever-
accelerating spiral" in arms budgets. The American strategic
offense and defense "package" from 1961 to 1967 greatly improved
in second-strike capability and in responsible control while its
budget declined by at least 40%, from 11.7 billion to 7.1 billion in
current prices. (In constant prices the decline was about 50%. The
strategic budget was more than 2% of the GNP of 1961, less than
1% in 1967.) The stereotype repeated throughout the early 1960's
that the strategic budget was accelerating while our actual security
decreased is grossly in error on both counts. The annual cost of a

530

useful ABM system that defends hard points and provides a thin
shield for American civil society, when averaged over a ten-year
period, comes to about one-tenth of the 5 billion dollars that the
United States was spending annually on anti-bomber defense at
the end of the 1950's. The thin defense of civil society, taken as
an increment to the defense of hard points, will average about
200 million dollars annually out of a GNP approaching nearly a
trillion.

Fifth, a smaller country, spending much less on research and
development, conceivably might achieve technological equality
with a much larger power. But the upshot of the foregoing is that
there is no rest. So far, the smaller forces lag in performance as
well as in size. Given advances in adversary offense and defense
technology, the planned three generations of the French force,
for example, may be negated by a few percent of the Russian
resources devoted to strategic offense and defense.

Arguments for smaller strategic forces in large countries, or
favoring the spread of nuclear weapons to medium and small
countries, purport to show that even a small nuclear force is
intrinsically capable of retaliation after attack by the largest
nuclear countries. Typically these analyses take a simple model of
a duel between two countries with sheltered forces. The attacking
side launches its entire force against the force of an adversary
who replies by launching the undestroyed remainder of his
force against the attacker's cities. To have a high confidence of
destroying the force attacked, it is usually said, sometimes as the
result of calculation, that for every vehicle it destroys, the attacking
force must expend many more of its own strategic vehicles. In
the more euphoric versions of these attempted stability proofs,
particularly those advanced in support of new national military
nuclear programs as "equalizers," the exchange ratio of attacking
vehicles expended as against those they can destroy is taken to be
over 60 to 1 (25,000 vehicles to destroy 400). Or over 25 to 1. Or 16
to 1. In the last six or seven years these hypothetical duels assume
more modest odds against the attackers: 5 or 3 to 1.

These highly simplified duels of vehicle against vehicle have
many shortcomings for a realistic estimation of the complex
problems of nuclear attack and response. (1) They omit completely
attacks on the more concentrated but critical elements of a
responsible system of deterrence, such as command, control, and
communications; and in actual nuclear forces a good many even
of the vehicles have been concentrated without adequate warning

531

and unsheltered. (2) Given appropriate costing, exchange ratios
may tell what adversaries have to spend to achieve given results,
but not whether they can easily afford it. (3) Even in their own
terms, the calculations seldom reflect the actual current techno-
logical, operational and cost factors. It is worth illustrating
some of these points, since hypothetical demonstrations of the
invulnerability of small forces have maintained a kind of invulner-
ability of their own by sticking to pure hypotheticals.

According to the press, the first generation French strike force
consists in 62 Mirage IV bombers and 12 KC 135 tankers. The force
is unsheltered and without any tactical warning of ballistic missile
attack. In the unwarned state the operational part of the force is
concentrated on about 10 points in the south and southwest of
France. The probability that any of this force will survive can be
made extremely low with a high confidence by reserving a force
of about 20 early generation Russian missiles with a strategy of
attack that uses extensive and timely information as to which attack
vehicles have failed, but without MIRVs or advanced accuracies.
The second generation French force was to add to the 10 soft
points on which aircraft are concentrated 30 additional points,
each with a single missile sheltered to resist 300 psi. Recent press
reports* indicate that the addition will amount to 75 rather than
30. However, 20 or so attacking launch vehicles, each equipped
with 10 reentry vehicles and an advanced guidance, could destroy
the first and second generation forces with a confidence of .9. And
higher confidences are quite feasible. In short, the changes taking
place in the offense cancel these additions to a small nuclear strike
force. Much more important than the offense-to-defense exchange
ratio, 20 or 30 launch vehicles might be a bit more or less than 2
percent of the number of vehicles in a Russian strategic force. ^

The part in movement underwater of a small third generation
missile submarine force is not subject to straightforward ballistic
missile attack. And submarines are hard to hunt and kill.
However, a small missile submarine system taken as a whole is
not immune to interdiction, in particular by an adversary with
a large, varied and sophisticated offense and defense. A large
adversary can launch missiles at the fixed elements: at the sizable
fraction of the small submarine forces in port, and at the fixed
command, control and communications that are a key element
of a responsible strategic force. He can muster a much larger
destroyer and submarine force to hunt the few submarines at sea
and aid his hunt with complex mixtures of various sensors, data

532

processing and communication. Finally, most important in the
1970's, he may interpose a thin antiballistic missile system that is
extremely effective against small numbers of incoming objects.

In sum the theory that nuclear weapons are "equalizers,"
that, equipped with them, any country, no matter how small, can
surely retaliate against any other country, no matter how large,
is in error. The small forces we have examined would have little
chance to survive a modest attack, much less a major sophisticated
one. Neither past nor future technologies bear out the equalizer
theory.

Sixth, subtler theories that take small nuclear forces, not as
equalizers, but as "triggers," are also put in doubt by any concrete
examination of technologies, operations, and costs. A triggering
force too small in itself to deter a great power enemy is supposed
to be able to release an unwilling strategic force of one of the
principal nuclear powers against the other. Unlike the equalizer,
such a triggering force then is not a substitute for alliance or
unilateral commitments for protection, so much as a way of
making these commitments operative. The trigger theory seems
to be replacing that of the equalizer in Europe and perhaps also
among advocates of national nuclear forces in India and Japan.
While a subtler theory, it is less consistent and usually vaguer.
Intuitively it would appear that a small force, prepared especially
to compel a major ally to use nuclear weapons when that ally
thinks it unwise, might loosen alliance bonds. It might offer some
incentives to the ally to tie its fate less closely with the small
power. And it might, on the whole, suggest to an adversary that
the identification is less close. The mechanism linking the small
trigger to the large force is extremely obscure and very seldom
explained in operationally meaningful terms.

Where it is precise enough for close analysis, it may be
rendered doubtful by the same technological and operational facts
that call into question the equalizer theory. For example, the more
rigorous formulation offered by Arthur Lee Burns covers two
kinds of trigger, a passive and an active one. The passive trigger,
while small, is supposed to be so protected that a major nuclear
adversary could destroy it only by expending so much of his own
force that he could no longer deter the small power's major ally.
An active trigger could, by pre-empting, reduce the force of one
of the major powers enough to make it vulnerable to attack by the
other. The prospect of either sequence of events would deter the
major adversary. But the small forces we have examined would
be grossly inadequate in both an active and a passive role. They

533

would add little to the force of a large nuclear ally attacking a big
nuclear adversary, and their destruction would require their large
adversary to expend only a tiny fraction of his total retaliatory
force.

A force able to vie with or even to trigger a major nuclear
strike force must change rapidly enough to keep up: the forces
now planned by the smaller nuclear countries conceivably might,
but do not accomplish this. In short, there is no rest.

Seventh, even if a small nuclear force were able to protect any
country that had it, either because it was a trigger or an equalizer,
this would still leave unsolved the problem of protecting non-
nuclear countries from nuclear coercion. A small triggering
force seems particularly inadequate for extending guarantees to
non-nuclear countries. If it is unclear how it can protect its own
possessor by manipulating the two largest nuclear powers, it is
still more obscure how a triggering force can maneuver one of
them to protect a fourth power against the other; or to protect any
of some 130 non-nuclear powers.

Proponents of the equalizer theory on the other hand proceed
from the assumption that commitments for nuclear protection
by others are not merely unnecessary, but impossible, that no
country will risk responding to a nuclear attack on someone else.
In principle, if not always in practice, proponents of equalizers
must conclude that either no sovereign country must have nuclear
weapons or all of them should. Yet permanent and total nuclear
disarmament hardly seems at hand. And even if a few intrepid
proponents of nuclear equalizers might be ready to distribute
nuclear bombs to everybody, to most of us the perils are plain in
a spread of nuclear weapons rather less than world-wide.* Still, a
country without nuclear weapons that feels menaced by a nuclear
adversary is likely to seek nuclear weapons of its own unless it
feels assured of nuclear protection by someone else. Moreover,
since any country, nuclear or non-nuclear, is likely to have interests
affected by the coercion of some non-nuclear nation, perhaps a
neighbor, perhaps a more distant country, the issue of guarantees,
of formal or informal commitments for nuclear protection, cannot
be avoided.

In particular, long-range commitments and defenses that make
the risks of commitment commensurate with what is at stake will
continue to be essential for stability on the international scene. But
in recent times distant commitments have become increasingly
unpopular. This has been manifested in many diverse and
incompatible ways in the United States as well as in Europe: rising

534

nationalisms, a continental regionalism, a resurgence of moves
towards protection in trade, disillusionment with foreign aid and
with the turbulence and frustrations of the Third World, and a
weariness with distant wars that affects hawks, doves, and some
that fly dead center. But hopes for regional or national insulation
ignore features of technology that have long been current and that
will be greatly emphasized by developments in the future.

Distant Classical Wars, Old Geopolitics, and New Isolation

Revulsion against distant commitments may be based on an
understandable fatigue or on unanalyzed feelings of the irrele-
vance of remote troubles; and sometimes on the estimate that an air
or naval power can do little to affect remote land powers; or on the
theory, as expressed by Mr. Kennan, that "the effectiveness of the
power radiated from any national center decreases in proportion
to the distance involved." Geopolitical theories of spheres of
influence and stable balances of power between widely separated
large and small countries frequently presume such proportional
or linear decreases of military strength with distance.

Yet the relation has never been so simple. Logistic support
by water has in general been cheaper and easier than over land.
References in earlier geopolitical writing to continental land
masses, islands and the like, have been in fact a crude means of
characterizing some of the differences between water and land
combat logistics. In discussing geography, geopoliticians at best
have been talking about the technologies of communications or
transport or weapons range. Maxims so derived, however, are not
eternal. These technologies have been changing at a rapid clip.

Nonetheless the agonies of Vietnam have revived some
rather old-fashioned geopolitics. Whatever one's view of Vietnam
(and I have substantial differences with U.S. policy there), the
isolationism it has encouraged receives no adequate support from
such theories. Distance bears no simple relation either to interests
or military strength. For nuclear relations, the defects of the
old geopolitical treatment of distance are striking. However, its
defects for describing variations in non-nuclear military strength
with distance are also crucial.

It was rather common until recently to talk of the comparative
disadvantage to the United States in fighting eight or ten thousand

535

miles from home against an adversary whose home base is near
the scene of conflict. While these dramatic long-haul distances
catch the headlines, neither in current nor in past technology do
they determine the matter of comparative disadvantage. This has
been documented in detailed studies of the comparative logistics
at present levels of technology in several areas of possible non-
nuclear conflict — in Thailand, in the Himalayas, in Iran and in
Lebanon— and in the actual conflict in Korea.'

The most striking fact displayed by these studies is that the
long-distance lift capacity of each side massively exceeds their
short-distance lift inside the theater, especially in the very short
ranges in which the battle would be joined. These bottlenecks
inside the theater are to a very considerable extent determined
by local factors: climate, terrain, harbors, port unloading facilities,
railroad and road capacities, etc. They are not a function of the
long-haul distances. The specific local circumstances may favor
the combatant that starts from far-off; or the one that starts from
nearby. (Moreover, the local circumstances may be more or less
susceptible to change by the distant combatant, depending on his
resources, technical level and the physical geography he confronts.
They are likely to be changed by local, less-industrialized
combatants, in any case with their further industrialization. But
the supporting or combatant external powers will vary, before
or during a war, in their ability to construct harbors, roads, etc.)
On the Thai-Laos border the United States can lift, from 8,500
miles away, four times as much as China can from 450 miles off.
Various potential combat areas in Iran would show a logistic
standoff between the neighboring Soviet Union and the United
States. In the Himalayas, support for Chinese and for opposing
forces would be measured in tons per day: the 200,000 tons per
day the United States might deliver over the long haul from U.S.
ports to Calcutta are not the critical matter.

The figures above describe the rate at which supply can be
lifted steadily after the initial build-up. If one looks at various
rates of deployment and build-up, where stocks are accumulated
in advance in a potential trouble area, the conclusions are not
altered. Moreover, if one looks at the matter in cost terms, as
distinct from capacity, the minor importance of the long haul
appears even more vividly. Adding several thousand miles to the
distance at which remote wars are fought increases the total cost
of fighting such wars by only a very tiny percentage. It appears,
for example, that if the support of U.S. forces in Korea had been

536

2,000 miles further away, it would have meant adding less than
three-tenths of a percent to the total annual cost of the war.

The studies cited deal with recent past technology. The 1970' s
technology will decrease military communication and transport
costs further, but especially long-distance costs. As in the case of
computer technology described earlier, the terminal ends permit
fewer economies of scale. Larger payload transport both on the
surface and in the air will greatly reduce costs per ton-mile. Fast
deployment logistic ships might (Congress and the established
shipbuilders willing) combine with the planned massive increase
in air cargo capacity to offer more efficient mixtures of pre-
stockage and rapid deployment of men and material for the initial
build-up. The C-5A will be operational in large numbers in the
1970's; it will have a ton-mile cost one-tenth that of the DC-3 and
will carry 2-1/2 times the payload of the largest jet now flying.
Synchronous communications satellites make the point even
more clearly than improved transport.^" It has long been true in
telephony, for example, that a very large part of the costs of long
distance service is traceable to such elements as local switching,
operator charges and local lines. Communications satellites make
unimportant the distance between transmitting and ground
stations so long as both are within line of sight of the satellite,
whereas undersea cables vary in cost directly with length. Such
satellites may be on station over 50,000 miles above the earth. The
difference will be negligible in miles, not to say elapsed travel time
between electro-magnetic signals traveling between various pairs
of points on earth by way of an over 100,000 mile trip to and from
a satellite. ^^ Satellites spanning the Atlantic and Pacific will greatly
increase the capacity and reduce the costs of sending messages to
far-off and isolated locations, and so will make possible a much
more detailed and centralized control of classical wars in distant
theaters.

If future technology reduces further the difference between
fighting a war close by and far off, it can do this of course not
just for the United States, but for other nations as well. This is
only one reason that the technical developments should fortify
no illusion of omnipotence. We may contest some sorts of war
badly almost anywhere, in particular revolutionary wars where
recently improved weapons technologies seem to me largely
irrelevant (though no more so in Vietnam than they might be in
Colombia or even in Cuba). Military strength is frequently a very
poor and self-defeating way of protecting or fulfilling interests.

537

This applies to military strength used nearby as well as military
strength used far off. It is plainly better not to have to fight at all.
Even more plainly, an ability to fight with formal military force
cannot be directly translated into political authority. Limits in
the usefulness of American military strength are clear in relation
to countries hostile in varying degrees to the United States, such
as tiny nearby Cuba. Perhaps even more in relation to America's
allies. In spite of rhetoric about slavery to American despotism.
General DeGaulle always struck me as a rather masterful slave,
long before he had even a facade of a force de frap-pe. The point
can be made in reference to those allies most menaced and least
able to defend themselves. Polemists using words like "puppet,"
Mr. McCeorge Bundy has said, have never been on the other end
of the strings. It is rather more, I should think, like pushing than
pulling strings. The fact that military technology can be projected
by the United States and by others at great distances displays
some critical connections between remote parts of the world,
but lends no support to the mechanical extension of American
political hegemony.

Furthermore, though we can affect matters in some places
close to us or far off, we frequently have no discernible interest
in doing so. And even where we do, improved technologies
may not be the best vehicle for the influence we want to exert. In
the last year, the isolationist debate has shifted somewhat from
capabilities to interests. A good many places interest none of us
very much, and some that interest us can take care of themselves.
That's almost always better. No one on either side of the debate
is for intervention all over or for total escape. The genuine issues
concern the right extent and places of commitment. They cannot
be clarified wholesale. And they have not been by the endlessly
tedious repetitions and denials of the phrase "policeman to the
world."

A great many things — historic, political, ethnic, cultural,
sentimental — affect national interests, including a residue of past
technologies like the methods of ocean transport that linked Great
Britain, Spain, France, Portugal and the Netherlands durably to
some of the remotest parts of the world. But future technologies
will affect interests too; and on the whole in a direction that makes
the new isolationism pure nostalgia. Let me say something on
interests of nations in cultural contact, in trade and the movements
of capital, and in national safety.

538

VI
Distant Cultural and Economic Interests

Cultural interests have never fallen off directly with distance.
Englishmen and North Americans find Australians and New
Zealanders quite accessible culturally, and are sometimes greatly
puzzled by their immediate neighbors. French contacts with
some parts of North America were always considerable and
lately seem to be much on the increase. The vast improvements
coming in long-distance communications and transport will
multiply remote cultural contacts just as they will increase the
capacity to project military strength. They will extend processes
of education, learning and possibilities of cooperation in research.
Civilian supersonic passenger planes, the subsonic high payload
747 stretch jets, a possible passenger version of the C-5, and
the commercial satellites neatly parallel in the civilian field the
military equipment that make the problem of getting to a theater
of war small compared to getting about in it. Travelers are already
used to the sharp contrast between the speed with which they can
hurtle between distant airports and the maddeningly slow pace
for getting to and from the airport, and queuing up for tickets,
taxis, baggage, porters, and traffic lights.

High payload jets will cover great distances still more quickly
and cheaply; but may increase the queues. Supersonic jets will be
economic only on long trips. Their principal result will be to bring
the remote places closer. It has been pointed out that if sonic booms
prevent supersonic aircraft from flying over land, once again, as
in the time before the building of the transcontinental railroad.
New York will be closer to Europe than to Los Angeles. Passenger
traffic in the Pacific should increase still more strikingly. Travel
time from Los Angeles to Tokyo may be cut by nearly two-thirds.
It will take perhaps forty minutes more than from Los Angeles to
New York.

For civilian communications as for civil transport, the right
map cannot be drawn in kilometers or miles, in what Francois
Perroux calls "banal distance." Buenos Aires is closer now to
Europe or the U.S. than to Caracas or Santiago. Telephone calls
from Buenos Aires to Caracas go through New York. Calls between
two points in Africa may go through switch points in both London
and Paris. The new communications will alter optimal switching

539

points and help local traffic, but in particular will bring together
widely separated points.

From the standpoint of economic and strategic interests
one important result of improvements in communications and
transport will be to increase the geographical extent of interests and
simultaneously to reduce the specific importance of what are now
critical bottlenecks on transit points. Suez is an example: reducing
very long-haul costs cuts the added expense of a detour.

Indeed, most of what I have said about effects on cultural
contacts applies quite directly to economic interactions, that is, to
the movements of commodities and capital and possibly seasonal
labor. Air freight capacity has been increasing rapidly for high
value commodities; the huge cargo aircraft coming will make
distant air transport economic for new ranges of less valuable
commodities. For bulky primary commodities, those that are
lowest in value density, like oil, the development of super tankers
drastically reduces long-haul costs. While there are diminishing
returns to scale, the economies of scale are enormous. A tanker
with a capacity for 150,000 dead weight tons can move crude oil
5,000 miles at $1.69 per ton compared to $7.29 for a 10,000 dead
weight ton tanker. Construction costs decrease with increasing
tanker size from $220.00 per ton at 20,000 dead weight tons to less
than $70.00 at 300,000 dead weight tons. Operating costs decrease,
too, in particular with increased opportunities for automation.
In fact, the Tokyo Maru, a tanker of about 135,000 dead weight
tons, will be operated by a crew of 29, while tankers of 50,000
dead weight tons may use 35 men or more. The Japanese in the
early 1970' s will be constructing 500,000 dead weight ton tankers,
something like ten times the size of the largest tankers available
during the Suez Crisis of 1956. As a result of such changes, not only
are detours around gateways like Suez cheaper than they were;
they may, because of the limitations of the gateways themselves,
be cheaper than the direct route. Suez at present can handle fully
loaded tankers only up to 70,000 dead weight tons.

There is a fruitful analogy with the discretionary wiring
in micro-electronics to which I referred earlier. Just as the
multiplication of gates on a tiny wafer permits a detour around
ones that are not working, and so reduces the number of critical
interconnections, so the lowered costs and increased capacity
for both long distance transport and long distance transmission
of messages increase the number of economic alternatives

540

available and make it feasible to go around choke points. These
communications and transport developments reduce interests in
specific gateways to remote places, the points traditionally called
"strategic," but not the interest in remote places themselves. On
the contrary, to the extent that they make links to distant points
more reliable, they spread interests more evenly but farther. For
example, Japan's growing trade in manufactures with Europe will
risk less from arbitrary interruption. In reducing the risks of war
or peacetime interruption, these technical changes counter one of
the chief traditional arguments for economic autarky.

One argument for autarky current in many variants for nearly
150 years rests on technology. Robert Torrens^^ predicted that the
industrialization of additional countries, population growth and
diminishing returns in primary products would reduce the basis
for foreign trade. This hypothesis of course entails as corollary
the declining importance of trade among already industrialized
countries in particular. It is not an argument for intra-regional
trade but for the autarky of nations even within the same region.
In fact, it suggests reduction of trade among regions within a
single nation as these "converge" in economic structure.

This venerable argument" has several essential theoretical
flaws. Except in some extremely simplified economic models, a
convergence in over-all average efficiency of trading countries
does not entail a lessening of the possibilities of specialization
in particular products. Some advantages of specialization flow
not simply from economies of scale at fixed techniques, but from
such other matters as the gains from learning which come with
cumulatively great output. The argument neglects technical
changes like the global extension of communications that tend
to create world markets for specific products, and neglects
techniques that increase the advantages of trade such as reduction
in freight and communications costs. Increasing income itself
creates a demand for variety and for products of higher value
in which transport costs are in any case less important. Finally,
like some sounder theories that oppose it, the Torrens and related
hypotheses say nothing in principle about the way the benefits
of trade vary with geographical distance, and in particular how
transport costs as a complex function of distance may change
and flatten over time with changing techniques. Even if in the
absence of trade countries had marginal costs in identical ratio
for their many highly differentiated products, there would be a
basis for specialization and exchange, so long as some short or

541

long run costs declined and transport expense did not wipe out
cost differences. However, such identical ratios are implausible;
the increased output permitted by specialization and trade almost
surely for some commodities would be accompanied by a decline
in costs in the short or long run; and transport costs are decreasing,
especially for distant places.

Aside from its theoretical lacks, the belief that technology
would reduce the role of trade does not square with available data,
even though the benefits of trade are hampered by government
barriers. World trade in manufactures in the 90 years after 1876,
in spite of setbacks in the protectionist and depressed interwar
period, increased per capita two or three times. Between 1950 and
1966 it has been increasing even faster than world production of
manufactures — 7.3% compared to 5.3% per annum.^^ For the United
States, in spite of claims to the contrary, from 1879 to 1960 neither
exports nor imports declined relative to GNP in real terms.^^
Similarly within the United States, interregional trade, as Richard
Cooper has shown, has grown more rapidly than total output, in
spite of an apparent "convergence" in economic structure of the
various regions.^*

What is true of trade seems true also of the movements of
capital, when not constrained by artificial barriers. Improvements
in long-distance travel and telecommunications encourage distant
foreign investment by making it easier to manage. Large-scale
data processing may stimulate organizational innovation and in
any case makes feasible much more detailed and far-flung control.
All of this should continue to encourage the already significant
growth of international corporations whose interests extend far
beyond any narrow geographical region, and make economic
autarky more inappropriate than ever. Distant interests should not
be taken, however, as applying only to the capital-rich countries
as an attribute of "imperialism." The underdeveloped world
has perhaps even more obvious interests in distant developed
countries as a source of aid and as a market for exports. Indeed,
as Edwin Reischauer suggests, one of the more disturbing aspects
of some of the new isolationism is an implication that "Asians,
having their own distinctive cultures and special problems,
should go their own way, presumably in poverty and turmoil,
while we of the advanced nations go our own prosperous and
peaceful way."

The revolution in transport and communications casts doubt
not only on the new isolationism of a growing minority but also

542

on the more respectable but rather mechanical regionalism that
may frequently be found in both the Democratic and Republican
establishments: the grand designs for Latin American common
markets, Asian common markets, African unions, economic
unities spanning the Middle East from Morocco to Afghanistan,
and others. The composition of some of these groupings suggests
how poor a criterion mere proximity is for association. Some have
higher cost communication and transport links among themselves
than to the outside world. They may be mainly rival exporters
of the same commodities, those in which they have the greatest
comparative advantage. Yet a mechanical regionalism is not
exclusively American. The head of the Commission of European
Communities recently expressed his conviction that the world
will inevitably organize itself into continents just as it organized
itself into nations five centuries ago. And there are crasser forms
of isolationism in Europe as well.

At the start of World War II it was the isolationists like Charles
Beard, Jerome Frank, Stuart Chase and many others who urged a
self-sufficient, "continental" American policy. They argued in fact
that elsewhere than in the United States continental integration
was the wave of the future and the only way to peace in the
world. Interventionists argued for the primacy of overseas links in
cultural, economic and military terms. Naturally they had a great
deal of support from the future allies overseas. It is remarkable
that having successfully countered arguments for regional self-
sufficiency, so many interventionists ended the war supporting
one regionalism or another, and as technology moved further in
the opposite direction, espoused regional solutions for more and
more of the world.

Reducing trade barriers inside a region may permit important
economies of scale and indirect benefits to future growth as well
as direct gains in efficiency at a given time. But this applies also to
reducing trade barriers among countries that are not contiguous
and that may be very widely separated. From a cosmopolitan
view, the direct gains from a customs union depend on whether
the increased trade and specialization within the union would
outweigh the decrease in division of labor as between the union
and the countries outside; whether in short it involved a net shift to
higher or lower cost sources. Some unions might represent a gain;
some would surely be a loss, particularly if their composition were
determined solely on the basis of criteria as unrelated to economic
efficiency as contiguity. Many groupings of countries outside the

543

West seem little more than a literary or touristic convenience for
Europeans and Americans, or a bureaucratic convenience for
dividing up the work in their Foreign Offices. Various members
of such a "region" may otherwise have had rather little economic
or political interest in each other. Nor much interest in military
cooperation.

Neighborhood, in international relations, as Jacob Viner
has pointed out, has never guaranteed neighborly feelings, and
often has prevented them. Writings on international relations
in the 18th century and later often took proximity as one of the
natural conditions of enmity. Indeed one of the largest defects of
regionalism in the post-war period has been a frequent neglect of
the hard truths of differences in political interest inside regions and
the varying bonds of interests with countries outside. Regionalism
which has seemed a half-way house between nationalism and a
Utopian universalism has itself sometimes been a kind of Utopia
for hard-headed Realpolitikers.

The historic antagonisms that divide a geographical region
of course may be the very reason offered for a focus on regional
association. But the network of conflicting and common interests
extends far beyond a single region, and so do problems of
conciliation. Today Germany is not the greatest menace to the
English or the French. Just as generals are said to prepare always
to fight the last war, so statesmen and social scientists may be
prone to prevent the last war, but not the next.

The future increasing ease of communication and transport
should not be taken as simply irenic, leading only to harmony and
peace. On the contrary, it means an extension of the "neighbor-
hood" to more remote areas, and such larger neighborhoods
need not mean neighborliness any more than the small ones. The
possibilities of coercion as well as cooperation increase. Which
brings us back to the third interest, that of national safety.

VII

Interests in Safety

National safety is the most critical matter and perhaps the
least understood by those who think of it in terms of 19th century
and earlier technologies, or by those who conceive of it exclusively
in terms of bilateral nuclear deterrence, the preoccupation of the
mid-1950's. One essential here is that improvements in the technol-

544

ogy of combat delivery and logistics support affect not merely
one's own capabilities and those of one's friends, but those of
potential adversaries as well. These changes then drastically
extend the range at which potential adversaries can do harm. This
is most obvious in the case of the technologies for nuclear war.
Not only nuclear capabilities of the two largest powers, but also of
others, will extend far beyond any single region, and will permit
coercion if unopposed.

But improvements in technology extend the range at which
classical, not just nuclear, conflicts may be fought. And as in the
case of nuclear technologies such improvements apply to potential
adversaries too. While neither for the nuclear nor the classical
case is distance without effect, the effects are complex; and very
much more complex than is recognized by linear theories of the
weakening of strength with distance. ^^ Nonetheless, the upshot
of these considerations of 1970's technology is that basic interests
in safety will extend farther out than they ever have before. And
a great many of the new isolationists in the United States were
interventionists in World War II because they recognized that even
then interests in security extended far beyond one's hemisphere.

A second essential is that bilateral mutual deterrence is not
enough to prevent the international system from deteriorating.
A small nuclear force, we have seen, is hardly likely to make
any country that has it the equal of any other in deterring attack
on itself. And the technological defects of small nuclear forces
limit their potential for protecting their possessors indirectly by
triggering one major power against the other. However, even
if these defects did not obtain and any country with nuclear
weapons could thereby get direct or indirect protection for itself,
there would still remain the need to protect non-nuclear countries
from nuclear coercion. And giving bombs to everybody hardly
seems the way to do it.

On the other hand, getting stable isolated nuclear balances
in Asia or the Middle East or other areas that comprise diverse
antagonisms and varying interests with respect to countries
outside, will not be easy. Simple balances involving nuclear
commitments from one or two member countries will be hard
to make persuasive, and some of the members may feel more
menaced by the regional nuclear capabilities than assured.
Multiple regional nuclear balances would by definition involve an
extensive spread of nuclear weapons with the attendant problems
of a still further spread by a chain reaction with countries in and

545

out of the region and increased probabilities of nuclear war by
accident or design. Multilateral nuclear forces (MLF) for such
diverse "regions" as Asia seem much less feasible even than the
European counterpart. And an Arab-Israeli MLF seems rather far
off in the future. Or even a Saudi-Hashemite-Algerian-Egyptian
one.

While a variety of forms of cooperation among countries
in and out of a particular region may be useful, long distance
nuclear commitments by great powers have been essential at the
very least to cancel long distance threats by others. The growth of
new long distance nuclear forces like that of China will emphasize
these.

Long distance commitments confer no perfect stability. But
neither does any other alternative. I do not think that the deterrence
between the United States and the Soviet Union is unconditional.

In a many-nation world including so far 5 countries that have
exploded nuclear devices and about 130 that have not, unconditional
deterrence, I would stress, is not a sensible goal. If each of the nuclear
countries could unconditionally deter any other, this would mean the
instability of nuclear peace, not stability. Any nuclear power could then
threaten or safely use nuclear weapons against any non-nuclear one
within range.

Commitments for protection against nuclear coercion or
attack, whether tacit or explicit, formal or informal, unilateral
or in alliance arrangements or in the form of a United Nations
collective security agreement, are a necessary element of stability
on the international scene. Long range commitments and defenses
that make the risks of commitment commensurate with what is at
stake are essential.

The word "commitment" may perhaps be traumatic, given
all of the remote and uncertain conflicts in which so many of us
have been engaged. A commitment, moreover, lessens autonomy
in one way or another for both the party committed and the
recipient of the commitment. The United States commits itself in
NATO to regard an attack on Europe as an attack on itself. It has
extended commitments in varying degrees to other allies and to
some non-aligned countries. This is frequently painful but it is not
quixotic. If we do not commit ourselves and keep it plain that the
configuration of our interests and capabilities make the sacrifice
smaller in fulfilling the commitment than in not fulfilling it, the
countries in question would have to preserve their safety by their
own means; and to try to obtain nuclear safety by nuclear means.

546

In a great many cases these are likely to be even less perfect than
the long distance commitment. And the failure to make long
distance commitments would reduce options by changing the
international environment adversely.

In sum, neither military capabilities, nor economic interests,
nor interests in cultural contacts, nor in national safety seem likely
to be narrowly circumscribed by geography, to be contained, for
example, by continents. Neither national nor regional autarkies
look sensible in either strategic or economic or political terms.
Orwell projected for 1984 a world split into a few huge blocs. I find
such a prospect neither attractive nor likely to improve the chance
of peace. Even inside a single nation sharp regional lines dividing
the country into groups with different political, sentimental,
ethnic, and economic interests make civil war more likely. On a
world scale it would be more ominous. Orwell showed his insight
by having his huge continental blocs constantly at war. The fact
that, so far as technology is concerned, the 1970' s do not seem to
be marching toward 1984 strikes me then as all to the good. There
are many forms of cooperation including, I would stress, some
regional ones that are useful for specific and limited purposes.
But perhaps it's just as well that the useful sorts of association are
"cross-cutting," likely to vary in membership from one purpose
to another.

We all believe in the importance of preserving options, of
being able to defer decision in order to make a final resolve on
the basis of the utmost information about alternatives. We feel
uneasy about getting involved, "contracting in." Nonetheless,
contracting out isn't genuinely feasible. Commitment, foreclosing
some options, is essential if we want to keep others open in
the future. Speaking here at Elsinore, Denmark, in Hamlet's
shade, I find it appropriate to emphasize that decision cannot be
postponed indefinitely, that putting off the awful day frequently
makes things still more awful; that we must commit ourselves.
The technologies of the 1970's suggest that many of the essential
commitments will continue to be long distance.

547

ENDNOTES - Wohlstetter - Strength, Interest and New
Technologies

1. Presented at Elsinore, Denmark, September 28, 1967, as the
opening address of the 9th Annual Conference of the Institute
for Strategic Studies on Military Technology in the 1970's. 1 am
indebted to Paul Armer, Michael Arnsten, Dan Ellsberg, Malcolm
Hoag, Oleg Hoeffding, A. W. Marshall, David McGarvey, Richard
Nelson and Charles Wolf for their comments on an earlier draft,
and to Miss Janina Bonczek for research assistance.

2. See Victor Gilinsky, "Fast Breeder Reactors and the Spread
of Plutonium," RM-5148-PR, Santa Monica, CA: The RAND
Corporation, 1967.

3. Cf. Leonard Beaton, "Nuclear Fuel-for-All," Foreign Affairs,
Vol. 45, No. 4, July 1967, pp. 662-669.

4. This describes the changes only very grossly. For the source
of these three estimates and for more detail, see Paul Armer,
"Computer Aspects of Technological Change, Automation and
Economic Progress," printed in "Technology and American
Economy," the report of the National Commission on Technology,
Automation and Economic Progress, Appendix, Vol. 1, The Outlook
for Technological Change and Employment, Washington, DC: U.S.
Government Printing Office, February 1966, pp. 1-205 through
1-232.

5. Since this paper was written, the United States Government
has announced that it will deploy a thin ABM system.

6. William Beecher, "Small Atomic Arms Being Developed by
France," The New York Times, April 14, 1967.

7. The Institute of Strategic Studies, The Military Balance,
has for some time now attributed to the Soviet Union well over
2,000 medium and long-range manned and unmanned strategic
vehicles.

8. See Hedley Bull, The Control of the Arms Race, New York:
Praeger, 1965; and Albert Wohlstetter, "Nuclear Sharing: NATO
and the N+1 Country," Foreign Affairs, April 1961. In the latter

548

paper I tried to examine more inclusively the disincentives and
incentives for acquiring a nuclear strike force, and in particular the
high costs of small nuclear forces that seriously aim at surviving
a major power attack. More recent cost study emphasizes the
results presented there.

9. For more detail on these studies, see Albert Wohlstetter
and Richard Rainey, "Distant Wars and Far Out Estimates,"
monograph presented at the APSA meeting. New York City,
September 1966. Cf. also Albert Wohlstetter, "Theory and
Opposed Systems Design," to be published in New Approaches to
International Relations, Morton Kaplan, ed. In this connection we
are indebted to the work of Mary Anderson, Wallace Higgins, L.
P. Holliday, Norman Jones and John Summerfield.

10. I am indebted here to the work of Leland Johnson. See
"Some Implications of New Communications Technologies for
National Security in the 1970's."

11. This formulation was suggested to me by H.S. Rowen.

12. Essay on the Production of Wealth, London, 1821.

13. Frequently revived and modified by Werner Sombart at the
turn of the century, by Keynes and D. H. Robertson in the 1930's,
and more recently by Karl Deutsch and Alexander Eckstein.

14. For the years up to 1959 see Alfred Maizels, Industrial
Growth and World Trade, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University
Press, 1963, pp. 79 ff. For an extension of these data through 1966,
see "Monthly Economic Letter" of the First National City Bank,
New York City, September 1967.

15. See Robert Lipsey, Price and Quantity Trends in the Foreign
Trade of the United States, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1963.

16. Richard Cooper, "Growth and Trade: Some Hypotheses
About Long-Term Trends," Journal of Economic History, December
1964.

549

17. See Wohlstetter and Rainey, "Distant Wars and Far-Out
Estimates," op. cit., for the complex effects of distance on nuclear
capabilities as well as classical strength. And for a very detailed
empirical study of the effects of various critical distances on nuclear
capabilities in the 1950' s, see A. J. Wohlstetter, H. S. Rowen, F. S.
Hoffman and R. J. Lutz, The Selection and Use of Strategic Air Base
Systems, R-266, Santa Monica, CA: The RAND Corporation, 1954.

550

How Much is Enough? How Mad is MAD? (1974)

Albert Wohlstetter

From Fred Warner Neal and Mary Kersey Harvey, eds.,
Pacem in Terris III, Vol. 2: The Military Dimensions of For-
eign Policy, Washington, DC: Center for the Study of
Democratic Institutions, pp. 37-43. Copyright © 1974
Fund for the Republic. Reproduced with permission of
NPQ/ Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions.
Wohlstetter' s remarks below respond to two addresses, Clark
Clifford's "The National Interest and Military Power," and
Herbert York's "Nuclear Deterrence: How to Reduce the
Overkill. "

On the important subject of deterrence, the two main
speakers agree on relying on the "assured nuclear destruction"
of civilians. 1 feel called upon to introduce a note of discord and
to ask some questions. My questions center mainly on Herbert
York's praiseworthy effort to make a little saner what he himself
has called an essentially mad strategic doctrine, deterrence
by threatening the mass destruction of civilian populations.
However, in considering whether alternative forms of deterrence
entail a strategic arms spiral, 1 shall question the received notions
reflected by Mr. Clifford as well as by Mr. York, as to the nature
and actual history of strategic arms competition.

The received strategic doctrine in the foreign policy
establishments today calls not only for keeping civilians
defenseless on both sides, but for deliberately aiming whatever
strategic forces are available exclusively to kill the adversary's
civilians; for avoiding military targets; and for shunning as much
as possible any development of discriminateness, of an ability
to destroy military targets without destroying civilians en masse.
This doctrine of "mutual assured destruction," identified by its
acronym "MAD," has never been officially accepted as the policy
for using nuclear force by either the Soviet or the American
government. Nor do the forces of either side conform to such a
policy. The Soviet Union, for example, continues to spend roughly
as much on defense of its civilian population as the United States
spends on strategic offense and defense. Official statements on
both sides insist that, whatever the capabilities for reciprocal mass
civilian destruction, in the event of a nuclear war the governments

551

would use their forces against a variety of military targets. As
Mr. York has pointed out, accuracies, and therefore the ability to
reduce unintended destruction, have improved dramatically, and
are likely to continue improving on both sides.

Some systems analysts gave currency to the ghastly and most
unassuring phrase "mutual assured destruction." They stressed,
however, that this was an accounting device, measuring only how
the forces could be used, rather than a reflection of the policy for
their actual use in the event of war. The relevance and meaning of
such macabre accounting are dubious. In any case, much is wrong
with both the doctrines and the forces of the superpowers.

However, a responsible policy would move away from, rather
than toward, the targeting of civilians. The diverse critics of MAD
range from the respected Princeton theologian and student of the
ethics of war, Paul Ramsey, to the current director of the Arms
Control and Disarmament Agency, Fred Ikle, to Michael May,
who, like Herbert York, formerly directed the Lawrence Livermore
Radiation Laboratory. Mr. York accepts one of their most powerful
objections, namely that even if MAD were a persuasive deterrent
to a thoroughly rational decision-maker, such rationality is hardly
universal. Even if no one "deliberately takes the responsibility for
the appalling destruction and sorrow that war would bring in its
train," as the Pacem in Terris Encyclical said, "the conflagration
may be set off by some uncontrollable and unexpected chance." In
that event, to execute the doctrine would mean an unprecedented
mass slaughter of unoffending civilians.

Mr. York therefore proposes to limit the damage that would
be done in such a case by altering not the aiming points but the
size of the force aimed, leaving essentially intact the MIRVed (to
use the jargon) missile force, Poseidon and Minuteman III. For
these remaining missiles he would limit the yield of each warhead,
if I understand him, to twelve-and-a-half kilotons. I presume he
would welcome, if not insist, on cutting the Soviet force to the
same total of small warheads.

Now I want to stress that I am completely sympathetic with
attempts to modify so harsh a doctrine, though I never supported
it in the first place. I favor reducing the weight of the explosives
that can be launched by strategic forces. I would like to see each
side with the same total, and that total much lower than the
present U.S. capacity.

552

However, one must question Mr. York's reduced force on
the following grounds: first, if it is deliberately aimed at killing
civilians, will the reduction in fact significantly limit the slaughter?
Second, would the alternative of aiming such a reduced force at
military targets provide a useful deterrent and yet destroy fewer
bystanders? As for the first question, even if the twelve-and-a-
half kiloton limit were monitorable, the successful launching of
three-quarters of Minuteman III missiles, and less than half the
Poseidon, when aimed solely to kill Russian civilians, would
promptly destroy nearly 100 million. The delayed effects from
fallout would be small only in comparison with this enormous
immediate slaughter. In short, simply reducing the force, as he
proposes, would not accomplish Mr. York's goal. Even more
drastic cuts in the strategic force to a size that still remains
reasonably secure against attack in the face of uncertainties or
unmonitorable increases, will not make it small enough to keep
the slaughter less than catastrophic, so long as the force is aimed
exclusively at defenseless population centers.

A nuclear war will in any case be terrible, but if deterrence fails,
the alternative to aiming at civilians is to aim at military targets,
to limit these targets in number, to choose them in part precisely
for their geographical separation from civilian population centers
so as to keep the destruction of civilians as low as one can; to
select weapons and yields accuracies with that purpose in mind;
and, specifically, to reduce fallout by using weapons with a lower
fission fraction and by avoiding surface bursts. In fact, surface
bursts in such military attacks are a doubly bad idea: they not only
increase the unintended harm done by fallout; they also reduce
the intended harm to military structures, both hard and soft, from
blast overpressure — the most predictable weapons effect, and
therefore the one that would be counted on by a conservative
military planner. Further, the alternative is to maintain command
and control of nuclear weapons throughout the conflict, to avoid
destroying adversary command centers, and to try to bring the
war to an end as rapidly as one can, with as much as possible left
intact of civilian society.

This suggests an answer to the second question raised by Mr.
York's proposal. There are tens of thousands of possible military
targets, just as there are at least equal numbers of villages and
farms containing civilians that could be attacked. But there is no
legitimate military need to attack every single military target, not
to say every civilian target. The force that Mr. York proposes.

553

given the accuracies that he himself has predicted, could destroy
any of several selected military systems, either long-range or
general-purpose forces and their means of support. The loss
of such massive and costly systems, especially along tensely
disputed borders, would be felt as an enormous disaster by a given
political-military leadership, leaving it and the nation naked to its
enemies. Why wouldn't the prospect of such a loss be an excellent
deterrent? Must we aim to kill noncombatants? I favor cutting the
force to an agreed lower total, though I would specify the cuts
differently. For reducing mass destruction of civilians, however,
what is essential is how the force would be aimed and used.

Herbert York is concerned that if we aim at anything other than
population centers this would mean more and larger weapons,
and so more unintended damage to civilians than would be done
deliberately by use of his proposed force. On the face of it, given
the concentration of populations and their vulnerability to even
a few weapons, this seems implausible. With the accuracies Mr.
York and others expect, fewer and smaller weapons than those
deployed in the present forces, which may be agreed to under
SALT II, would do very well for attacking military targets. For
one thing, SALT I already limits numbers, and SALT II can limit
them further.

The hypothetical "spiral" models, popular in the academy,
seem to me quite remote from the realities. For years claims have
been repeated, without supporting evidence, that there has been a
spiral increase in strategic budgets, in megatonnage, or in the area
that could be destroyed by strategic weapons. And it has been
argued that this spiral would continue upward unless civilians
become the exclusive targets. These claims are simply inconsistent
with actual U.S. history.

The United States has always aimed its nuclear arsenal at
military targets, and this has not meant an exponential increase
in destructive power in the past. In constant dollars, strategic
budgets in the mid-1950s were two-and-a-half times what they
are now. Strategic defense vehicles, which current arms race
theory supposes to be particularly destabilizing, peaked at seven
times what they are now. Offensive vehicles, as Messrs. Clifford
and York observe, have been roughly constant.

Moreover, contrary to the stereotype, not only has strategic
megatonnage declined drastically, but the geographical area
that could be destroyed by the many smaller warheads has been
declining for many years, and in 1972 was the same as in 1956. We

554

may reach agreements, and I hope we do, on still lower strategic
budgets. But can we justify aiming our nuclear weapons at civilians
simply because they're easy to reach and cheap to kill? Because,
so to speak, these noncombatant populations are available in the
large, economy size? We should question not only the familiar
arguments about budget instabilities occasioned by a supposed
arms race, but also the argument that strategic forces aimed exclu-
sively at civilians can provide a stable deterrent ("even one bomb
aimed at one city," etc.), while a force aimed at military targets
cannot.

To deter, one needs to possess not only a capability to destroy
something that's important to an adversary, but also an ability
to convince him that the capability would actually be used in
response to the action one wants to deter. However, if the action
to be deterred left our own civilian society essentially intact —
as it would if the action were, for example, a nuclear attack
directed at an ally in Europe or at Japan — would our promise to
respond be convincing if our response would lead not only to
the destruction of an adversary's civilians but also of our own?
One of the many problems with MAD, when used as a threat, is
that the destruction it promises would, in fact, be mutual and is
therefore quite obviously unassured. On the other hand, a policy
of attacking military targets that minimizes unintended civilian
fatalities would offer incentives for an adversary to reciprocate
under similar restraints by attacking military targets, thereby
making unnecessary both mass homicide and mass suicide.

In any case, military attacks, even with the proposed
reduced force, could scarcely remove the possibility of the urban
destruction to which proponents of MAD cling. With Mr. York's
proposed force of Minuteman III and Poseidon (assuming ten re-
entry vehicles per Poseidon, rather than fourteen), there would
be 6,200 strategic warheads on each side. No one could dream
of successfully destroying 6,199; for whatever that is worth, the
possibility of one bomb on one city would always remain. A
responsible deterrent calls for a less reckless, less homicidal, and
less suicidal response.

One final point concerns detente. The process of constructing
common interests and warranted mutual trust among sovereign
nations with a long history of divergence is likely to be lengthy
and painful. The Pacem in Terris Encyclical had something to say
about the disabilities of threats and fears as a way of moving men
toward common goals. In the long run, mutual threats to kill

555

innocent populations seem an especially poor way of building a
community of interests between the Soviet Union and the United
States.

556

Bishops, Statesmen, and Other Strategists
on the Bombing of Innocents (1983)

Albert Wohlstetter

Must the West threaten to bomb innocent bystanders in order
to deter nuclear war? Does the West itself need to be threatened
with annihilation of its civil society in order to be deterred?
President Reagan's speech of March 23, 1983, proposing a decades-
long research program to protect civilians against ballistic-missile
attack revived these questions. The instant hoots of ridicule and
references to Star Wars from many Senators and Congressmen
suggest that holding out the nightmare vision of last things, the
apocalypse, is now part of the nature of things; that the need to
threaten the end of the earth must dominate earthly policy.

In fact, the West has for years used apocalyptic threats as a
substitute for improving our capacity for discriminate response
and in particular for a conventional reply to conventional attack.
(The media hardly noticed the more immediate technical effort
urged in the President's speech — to improve conventional
technology.) Reckless nuclear threats and the intimidating growth
of both Soviet conventional and nuclear strength have had much
to do with the rise of the anti-nuclear movement here and in
Protestant Northern Europe. By revising many times in public
their pastoral letter on war and peace, American Catholic bishops
have dramatized the moral issues which statesmen, using empty
threats to end the world, neglect or evade. For the bishops stand
in a long moral tradition which condemns the threat to destroy
innocents as well as their actual destruction. They try but do not
escape reliance on threatening bystanders. Ironically, the view
dominating all their revisions reflects an evasive secular extreme
which, instead of speeding improvements in the ability to avoid
bystanders, has tried to halt or curb them. But because the bishops
must take threats seriously, they make more visible the essential
evasions of Western statesmen. That, however, is a kind of virtue.
The letter offers a unique opportunity to examine the moral,
political, and military issues together, and to show that, as the
President suggests, threatening to bomb innocents is not part of

557

the nature of things. Nor has it been, as is now widely claimed, an
essential of deterrence from the beginning. Nor is it the inevitable
result of "modern technology." It may be that our Senators and
even some of our younger Congressmen haven't watched Star
Wars closely enough.

The bishops have been sending a message to strategists in
Western foreign-policy establishments — and to strategists in
the Western anti-nuclear counter-establishments. It seems un-
equivocal: "Under no circumstances may nuclear weapons or
other instruments of mass slaughter be used for the purpose of
destroying population centers or other predominantly civilian
targets." Though that only restates an exemplary part of Vatican
II two decades earlier, it is far from commonplace. Nonetheless it
should be obvious to Catholics and non-Catholics alike. Informed
realists in foreign-policy establishments as well as pacifists should
oppose aiming to kill bystanders with nuclear or conventional
weapons: indiscriminate Western threats paralyze the West, not
the East. We have urgent political and military as well as moral
grounds for improving our ability to answer an attack on Western
military forces with less unintended killing, not to mention
deliberate mass slaughter.

The bishops seem to be countering the perverse dogma
which, after the Cuban missile crisis, came to be used by Western
statesmen eager to spend less on defense: that the West should
rely for deterring the Soviets on the ability to answer a nuclear
military attack by assuring the deliberate destruction of tens or
even hundreds of millions of Soviet civilians; and that the United
States should also, for the supposed sake of "stability," give up
any defense of its own civilians and any attack on military targets
in order to assure the Soviets that they could, in response, destroy
a comparable number of American civilians. The long humanist as
well as the religious tradition on "just war" stresses especially the
need to avoid attacks on "open," that is undefended, cities. The
new doctrine exactly reversed this; it called both for leaving cities
undefended and threatening to annihilate them. John Newhouse
succinctly states this dogma, to which he was sympathetic, in the
"frosty apothegm": "Offense is defense, defense is offense. Killing
people is good, killing weapons is bad." The late Donald Brennan,
a long-term advocate of arms control to defend people and restrain
offense from killing innocents, was not sympathetic. He noted that
the acronym for Mutual Assured Destruction— MAD — described
that Orwellian dogma.

558

Having observed long ago that not even Genghis Khan avoided
combatants in order to focus solely on destroying noncombatants,
I was grateful, on a first look at this issue in the evolving pastoral
letter, to find the bishops on the side of the angels. Unfortunately,
a closer reading suggested that they were also on the other side.
For, while they sometimes say that we should not threaten to
destroy civilians, they say too that we may continue to maintain
nuclear weapons — and so implicitly threaten their use as a
deterrent— while moving toward permanent verifiable nuclear
and general disarmament; yet we may not meanwhile flan to he able
to fight a nuclear war even in response to a nuclear attack.

Before that distant millennial day when all the world disarms
totally, verifiably, and irrevocably — at least in nuclear weapons —
if we should not intend to attack noncombatants, as the letter
says, what alternative is there to deter nuclear attack or coercion?
Plainly only to be able to aim at the combatants attacking us, or
at their equipment, facilities, or direct sources of combat supply.
That, however, is what is meant by planning to be able to fight a
nuclear war — which the letter rejects.

Perhaps the bishops can work this out in later statements.
But a close reading of their changing text, their congressional
testimony, and the writings of their associates suggests that
this is unlikely. For their struggle with conscience has led them
to make only more explicit the widespread confusions and
evasions of many secular strategists — including many statesmen,
scientists. Senators, editors, and business leaders. Take John
Cardinal Krol and Father Brian Hehir, who was staff adviser to
the ad hoc committee drafting the pastoral letter. Cardinal Krol
repeated in a sermon at the White House in 1979 what he and his
associates had been saying in recent years: in brief, "possession,
yes, for deterrence . . . but use, never." It is all right for the United
States implicitly to threaten the use of nuclear weapons, but "at
the point of such decisions, . . . political and military authorities
are responsible to a higher set of values" and so "must reject the
actual use of such weapons, whatever the consequences." Any
consequence "whatever" includes giving up military resistance.
But "the history of certain countries under Communist rule today
shows that not only are human means of resistance available and
effective but also that human life does not lose all meaning with
replacement of one political system by another."

Father Hehir elaborates this view: (A) We should not get
or keep an ability to attack combatants. (B) We may maintain

559

an ability to attack noncombatants while waiting for nuclear
disarmament, and (C) We may use that ability implicitly (though
not explicitly) to threaten retaliation against noncombatants. (D)
Indeed, to deter nuclear attack, we must convince other nations that
our "determination to use nuclear weapons is beyond question."
(E) We should never intend to use nuclear weapons. (F) Nor (to
make the deception harder) declare an intent to use them even in
reply to a nuclear attack. (G) We should never actually use them;
that is to say, we shouldn't retaliate at all.

Precisely how this volubly revealed deception is to fool allies
and adversaries "beyond question" has not itself been revealed.
(Future sermons at the White House might have to be classified.)
If the bishops could transmit that revelation, it would fortify a
good many strategists in our foreign affairs establishment who
want fervently to believe that we can safely deter an adversary
solely by threatening the nuclear extermination of his cities
while making clear to the entire world that we would never use
nuclear weapons at all; and who also want firmly to believe we
needn't spend much money on a less reckless defense. In sending
that message to Western elites the letter only relays, amplifies,
and broadcasts signals our elites have themselves been sending
for years. The troubling obscurity of the letter reflects that
establishment ambivalence and incoherence. On many matters
of technical military and political fact, the bishops derive their
views not from sacred authority but from a more doubtful range
of secular strategists than they realize. Much of the letter, for
example, stems from the strategists who hold that defense is
offense and that killing people is good and killing weapons bad —
the very strategists who would rely exclusively on threatening to
destroy cities.

In invoking divine authority to sustain such lay strategies,
the bishops' power seems dangerous to many Catholics who
disagree. But their moral prestige alone gives weight to the
bishops' strategic views with non-Catholics and Catholics. They
reinforce the impassioned pacifist and neutralist movements that
have been growing in Europe and in the United States, as well
as the establishment strategies which helped to generate these
protest movements.

560

*****

For the bishops pass lightly over or further confound many
already muddled and controversial questions of fact and policy.
In a world where so many intense, deep, and sometimes mutually
reinforcing antagonisms divide regional as well as superpowers,
are there serious early prospects for negotiating the complete,
verifiable, and permanent elimination of nuclear or conventional
arms? If antagonists don't agree, should we disarm unilaterally?
If we keep nuclear arms, how should we use them to deter their
use against us or an ally? Might an adversary in some plausible
circumstance make a nuclear attack on an element (perhaps a
key non-nuclear element) of our military power or that of an ally
to whom we have issued a nuclear guarantee? Might such an
enemy nuclear attack (for example, one generated in the course
of allied conventional resistance to a conventional invasion of
NATO's center or of a critical country on NATO's northern or
southern flank) have decisive military effects yet restrict side
effects enough to leave us, and possibly our ally, a very large
stake in avoiding "mutual mass slaughter"? Could some selective
but militarily useful Western response to such a restricted nuclear
attack destroy substantially fewer innocent bystanders than a
direct attack on population centers? Would any discriminate
Western response to a restricted nuclear attack— even one in an
isolated area on a flank — inevitably (or more likely than not, or
just possibly, or with some intermediate probability) lead to the
destruction of humanity, or "something little better"? Or at least
to an unprecedented catastrophe? Would it be less or more likely
than an attack on a population to lead to unrestricted attacks
on populations? Can we deter a restricted nuclear attack better
by threatening an "unlimited," frankly suicidal, and therefore
improbable attack on the aggressor's cities, or by a limited but
much more probable response suited to the circumstance?

The bishops' authorities slip by or confuse almost all these
questions. The bishops sometimes seem only to be saying that the
extent of direct collateral harm done by a particular restricted attack
is uncertain, quite apart from the possibilities of "escalation." At
other times they are certain that restricted attacks will lead to an
entirely unrestricted war. And they then suggest that the chance is
"so infinitesimal" that any Western nuclear response to a restricted
attack would end short of ending humanity itself, that we might
better threaten directly to bring on the apocalypse. The bishops

561

cite experts as authority for their judgment that any use whatever
of nuclear weapons would with an overwhelming probability lead
to unlimited destruction. And some of their experts do seem to
say just that. But some they cite appear only to say that we cannot
be quite sure (that is, the probability is not equal to one) that any
use of nuclear weapons would stay limited. If any response other
than our surrender is to be believed, it makes a difference whether
we talk of a probability that is not quite zero or a probability that
is not quite equal to one that any nuclear response would bring
on a suicidally total disaster. Yet two successive paragraphs in
the 1982 Foreign Affairs article by McGeorge Bundy, George F.
Kennan, Robert S. McNamara, and Gerard Smith proposing "no
first use" of nuclear weapons, which the bishops cite, assert each
of a wide range of such differing possibilities without distinction.
Most authorities relied on by the bishops are themselves not very
discriminating about which point they are trying to make.

Some important components of conventional military power
vulnerable to nuclear attack are close to population centers.
Others, however, may be very far from them — for example, naval
forces at sea; or satellites in orbit hundreds or even a hundred
thousand miles above the earth, that may be expected to perform
the essential tasks during a conventional war of reconnaissance,
surveillance, navigation, guidance, and communications. These
are more vulnerable to nuclear than conventional attack. If we
have no way of discouraging a limited nuclear attack except by
extracting a promise from an adversary that he will not attack, or
by threatening that we will respond to such isolated attacks with a
suicidal retaliation on his cities, an adversary might, in the course
of a conventional war, chance a small but effective nuclear attack
against such isolated military targets. Such an attack would do
incomparably less damage to civilians in the West than any of the
"limited" attacks discussed by the bishops' authorities. Is it really
so evident that a similarly restricted Western nuclear response to
such a nuclear attack would be nearly certain to escalate to the
end of humanity? Wouldn't a restricted response doing minimal
damage to civilians on either side be much less likely to escalate
than an attack on cities? And wouldn't the ability to respond in a
proportionate way be a better deterrent to an adversary's crossing
the gap between nuclear and conventional weapons? The bishops'
lay experts tend to see the Soviets as mirror images of themselves,
but sometimes diabolize them. They argue as if the Soviets would
not continue during a war to have the strongest possible incentives

562

to keep escalation within bounds; and as if the Soviets would love
every killing of a Western bystander exactly as much as the West
values his survival; as if the Soviet interest were in annihilating
rather than dominating Western society.

*****

In fact, calculations cited by the bishops' authorities hardly
probe the issue as to whether an adversary might use nuclear
weapons that would destroy key components of a military force
discriminately, leaving us a very large stake in making either a
discriminate response or no response at all. The calculations
published in 1979 by the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA),
in answer to an inquiry by supporters of MAD on the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee, deal with hypothetical "small"
and supposedly "limited" attacks. However, OTA's "limitations"
were not seriously designed to test the feasibility, now or in the
future, of destroying military targets and not population. One of
their "limited" cases involves direct attacks on the populations of
Detroit and Leningrad. And OTA's most "limited" Soviet attack
directed 80 one-megaton^ nuclear warheads at oil refineries,
including some inside Philadelphia and Los Angeles, in order
"to inflict as much economic damage as possible" and "without
any effort to maximize or minimize human casualties" (emphasis
added). No one should be surprised that such a "limited" attack
might kill about 5 million bystanders; or that a similar attack
on Soviet oil refineries might kill 840,000 — a result which the
influential English military historian, Michael Howard, describes
as "little better" than "a genocidal pact" killing up to 160 million
in each country and leaving the rest "to envy the dead."

The bishops rely heavily on a three-and-a-half page study
embodying the views of fourteen scientists who seem mainly to
be specialists in public health. The Papal Academy of Sciences
convened this group from several countries, including the Soviet
Union, "to examine the consequences of the use of nuclear weapons
on the survival and the health of humanity." Like the Physicians
for Social Responsibility in this country, the group considers
(except for one paragraph) only the effects of intentionally
bombing cities. It says that the consequences of such an attack on
the survival and health of humanity "appear obvious." Indeed
they have always been. That is the principal reason to reject MAD
and avoid threatening cities.

563

The papal study devotes one paragraph to "a nuclear attack
directed only at military facilities." Like the pastoral letter, that
paragraph assumes that any nuclear attack by an aggressor
anywhere or any response by his victim would be directed at all
the adversary's military facilities, however minor or irrelevant
to the immediate outcome of the conflict that generated the use
of nuclear weapons. It also assumes there would be no attempt
to explode the weapons at altitudes that avoided fallout and no
attempt in any other way to confine destruction to targets critical
to the conflict's outcome.

But such analyses dodge all the serious issues as to whether
an adversary might, in the course of a conventional war, use
some nuclear weapons with substantial military effect and yet
deliberately leave us and our allies with very strong incentives
to avoid mutual mass slaughter; and as to whether we should
have no response to such an attack except bringing on the mass
slaughter or surrendering; and no better way of deterring it than
promising one or the other or even, like the bishops' strategists,
both of these two incompatible bad alternatives.

Yet the problem of deterring nuclear coercion or attack on
an ally will persist. Despite lip-service at Geneva and the United
Nations, hardly anyone seriously expects that each and everyone
of the six or seven or eight nations that have made nuclear
explosives will destroy all their nuclear arms irretrievably and
verifiably in a future near enough to govern our present actions.
(The uncertainty as to the number of present nuclear powers
suggests some of the difficulty we would have in getting actionable
evidence that all of the existing nuclear powers had destroyed all
of their weapons.) Nor are all prospective nuclear powers likely
or even able to surrender the possibility of making the bomb.
Moreover, the harm that these weapons can do is so great that
merely reducing them to the numbers talked of by "minimum
deterrers," who would use the remainder to threaten the mass
slaughter of populations, would not remove and might increase
the probability of an enormous catastrophe. And it would not
prevent the potent use of threats of mass slaughter for coercing
those who have disarmed. Pope John Paul II has observed that "a
totally and permanently peaceful human society is unfortunately
a Utopia"; and that "pacifist declarations" frequently cloak plans
for "aggression, domination, and manipulation of others" and
could "lead straight to the false peace of totalitarian regimes."
(The Pope has known that false peace personally.)

564

*****

It has been obvious since the 1950' s that the West needs: to
rely less on threats of nuclear destruction and much more on
improving conventional defenses; to discourage the spread of
nuclear weapons; and to continue making nuclear weapons less
vulnerable to attack, safer from "accidental" detonation, and more
secure against seizure and unauthorized or mistaken use. The
Soviet Union has its own reasons, as have we, for undertaking
such measures unilaterally, with or without formal agreements or
even "understandings." Formal agreements on these matters, in
fact, have frequently defeated their overt purpose. Agreements,
for example, that were supposed to encourage exclusively peaceful
uses and research on nuclear energy have spread plutonium
usable in explosives. The bishops call for "strengthening
command and control over nuclear weapons" to make them more
secure against unauthorized or inadvertent use, but call more
strongly for agreement on a freeze — which would halt all current
programs to replace aging nuclear weapons with ones that are not
only more secure against seizure but safer against accidents, more
discriminate, and less susceptible to attack.

What is more, the West has many excellent reasons for reducing
the numbers and destructiveness of its nuclear weapons quite
apart from any agreement. The indiscriminate destructiveness of
the American stockpile (as measured in numbers of megatons) was
four times higher in 1960 than in 1980. The number of weapons
was one-third higher in 1967. The persistent failure of the bishops
and other strategists who make a fetish of bilateral agreements
to observe the unilateral decline in destructiveness and numbers
in American nuclear stockpiles shows, at the very least, a certain
lack of seriousness. In any case, if a freeze doesn't stop it from
doing so, the U.S. can reduce further and drastically the numbers
and destructiveness of its nuclear stockpile by exploiting the
improved accuracies possible today. Improved accuracies make
feasible greater discrimination as well as effectiveness in the use
of nuclear weapons, and they also make possible more extensive
replacement of nuclear with conventional weapons.

My own research and that of others has for many years pointed
to the need for a much higher priority on improving our ability to
hit what we aim at and only what we aim at. That would mean, in
particular, that effective conventional weapons could drastically

565

reduce the West's reliance on nuclear force. Moreover, for years
now, the thrust of technology, as in the electronics revolution, has
been to improve the possibilities of discrimination and control.
It can increasingly provide us with just such intelligent choices
between using conventional or nuclear weapons, and between
killing innocent bystanders with nuclear weapons or attacking
means of aggression and domination.

The danger of Soviet aggression is more likely to be lessened
by a Western ability to threaten the military means of domination
than by a Western ability to threaten bystanders. First, the
Soviets value their military power, on the evidence, more than
the lives of bystanders. Second, Western nonsuicidal threats
against legitimate military targets are more credible than threats
to bring about the destruction of civil society on both sides. The
latter have a negligible likelihood of being carried out by Western
leaders, and therefore cannot be relied on to dissuade Soviet
intimidation or aggression. Finally, it is even more absurd and
dangerous to suppose that the only way to dissuade the U.S. from
unleashing aggression is to help the Soviets threaten our civilians
by leaving them defenseless and by leaving us no choices other
than capitulation or an uncontrollably destructive offense against
Soviet cities that would invite the reciprocal destruction of our
own civil society.

Only some widely prevalent but shallow evasions and self-
befuddlements, and not any deep moral dilemma or basic paradox,
force us to threaten the annihilation of civilians in order to prevent
nuclear or conventional war. The bishops are clear about rejecting
the actual use of nuclear weapons to kill innocents. About threats
to kill innocents, they are much less clear. Their obscurity mirrors
an uneasy area of darkness at the core of establishment views.

Precisely because the bishops' views do not come from on
high but are shared by many in the establishment, and also in the
anti-nuclear and pacifist movements that shake the establishment,
it is worth looking at their arguments on the morality of nuclear
deterrence in the context of changing defense policies. Anti-
nuclear arguments proceed from premises about the inevitable
dependence of deterrence on threats deliberately or uncontrollably
to kill innocents. To some degree, bluffs about bringing on the
nuclear apocalypse helped generate the rise of the unilateral

566

nuclear disarmers; and continuing reliance on such bluffs helps to
disarm the establishment from answering the unilateral disarmers.
The arguments of both undermine deterrence.

Many recent accounts of defense policy in the nuclear age
rewrite history to lend an aura of inevitability to the extreme
view that we can reliably deter a nuclear attack in any plausible
circumstance solely by threats to kill innocents on both sides,
threats which we plainly should never and would never carry
out. Advocates of that dangerous self -paralyzing bluff claim that
this extreme has been the essential base of Western defense policy
since Hiroshima. It wasn't at the beginning. Nor was it the meaning
of the second-strike theory of deterrence that originated near the
start of the 1950' s. The second-strike theory did not hold that we
had to choose between deterring and being ready and willing
to fight if deterrence failed. Americans who oppose unilateral
disarmament have never split into a "party of deterrence" as
distinct from a "war party" that prefers fighting to deterring a
nuclear war. Advocates of MAD suggest as much. But MAD was
not declaratory policy before the mid-1960's. And it has never been
operational policy. Yet many liberal and conservative critics of the
bishops, like the bishops themselves, are under the impression
that it always has been. Many believe that MAD has kept the
nuclear peace and is therefore necessary, at least as myth. But the
evolution of doctrines and policies of deterrence needs to be seen
in relation to the changing technologies of discriminateness and
control as well as the technologies of nuclear brute force.

Mass Destruction and Initial Doubts about Stability

Manhattan Project scientists assumed immediately after
Hiroshima^ that the least destructive fission (or atomic) bomb
would affect so large an area and the number of such bombs
would always be so scarce that they were suited only to attacks on
large population centers rather than military forces or war plants
directly supporting them. Hence the standard description—
weapons of "mass destruction" or "mass slaughter." Worse
yet, the atomic scientists thought atomic deterrence extremely
unstable. (Leo Szilard, for example, thought in 1945 that the odds
for nuclear war in ten years were 9 in 10.) In short, the imminence
of total destruction was so probable that nothing less than world
government soon and total disarmament would permit survival.
It was — in a slogan common in 1945 to which Jonathan Schell
might now subscribe — "One World or None."

567

By the time it had become clear that we were not about to
get one world, and that atomic weapons could be used effectively
and in adequate numbers against military targets, the atomic
scientists' movement had come to the view that they should be
used only against military targets. By then, fusion weapons were
in prospect and many of the same scientists assumed, as they had
at first about the A-bomb, that the new H-bomb was suited only
to destroy population centers and, at that, offered a net advantage
over A-bombs only against a few of the largest population
centers. Therefore, they opposed the H-bomb and advocated a
vast expansion of the A-bomb stockpile to be used in fighting a
ground war in Europe, in anti-submarine warfare, in continental
defense, and against enemy bomber bases.

In 1952, thoughtful analysts of the implications of ther-
monuclear weapons like the economist Charles Hitch found
that — contrary to many claims — H-bombs were indeed much
more effective than A-bombs against military targets and war-
supporting industry; but, like the atomic scientists, he was
concerned that they raised the gravest problems of unintended
collateral damage to noncombatants. To reduce civilian casualties
one should give priority to targets outside cities and warn urban
populations to evacuate. Like the physicists. Hitch considered
mainly very large (25-megaton) H-bombs delivered with great
inaccuracy, that is, with half the bombs missing by a radius of at
least a half-mile and generally by well over a mile. Other writers
on the H-bomb at the time, like Bernard Brodie, an international
relations theorist who had once thought A-bombs were suited only
to attack whole cities, sometimes agreed with Hitch that H-bombs
made restraint essential and that war objectives had to be limited
as well; at other times he talked of them as "city busters"; at still
other times, he talked about their tactical advantage for use in
Europe where they could destroy so large an area as to frustrate
dispersion and concealment of ground forces.

Yet, whether one considered H-bombs or A-bombs, the trend
in NATO policy — if only to keep defense budgets within domestic
political bounds — was to rely increasingly on nuclear weapons in
large numbers and to neglect the unintended harm they would do.
Churchill, who justified British nuclear weapons in part because
they would be able to destroy military targets of special interest
to Britain, was so impressed by the destructive side-effects of the
H-bomb soon to be acquired by both Britain and the U.S., that he
talked vividly and hopefully of safety becoming the "sturdy child

568

of terror." The Republicans, coming to power at the end of an
unpopular and costly conventional war in Korea, talked of nuclear
weapons as simply "modern weapons" which furnished a "bigger
bang for a buck." They talked of massive retaliation against lesser
threats; and the NATO Military Committee in 1957 formally
adopted a strategy of threatening a "full" nuclear response even
to a local persisting incursion into NATO territory.

Inevitably, uneasiness about the sturdiness as well as the
morality of a balance based on threats of such massive destruction,
however unintentional, led many sober critics to propose more
limited applications of nuclear force, and especially the use of
small nuclear weapons on the battlefield. But it soon became clear
that nuclear weapons used on the battlefield in the center of Europe
also had drawbacks as a replacement for adequate conventional
force. The Carte Blanche exercise in 1955 indicated that the side
effects of their early introduction might kill nearly 2 million West
Germans and wound many others. Chancellor Konrad Adenauer
therefore resisted an increased reliance on nuclear weapons and
changed his mind only at the end of 1956, when he saw that a
conventional build-up in West Germany would be drastically
constrained by domestic political problems in getting eighteen-
month terms for army conscripts. After that, the Germans and
other West Europeans came more than any American President
since 1961 to favor relying on nuclear weapons as a cheap
substitute for conventional force.

Operational plans, however, have always differed from
the rhetoric of indiscriminate threats. Certainly NATO has
never planned to avoid military targets in order deliberately to
kill innocents at long or short range. NATO plans have always
included various restraints on the size of weapons used against
military targets in Eastern as well as Western Europe. Nonetheless
the problem of unintended harm to noncombatants on both sides
remained and always cast some doubt about the sturdiness of
deterrence and especially about the Western will to respond to
limited or isolated nuclear attacks against the military forces of
an ally. (Where that ally is a country on the northern or southern
flanks of Europe, the doubt is most obvious; yet these "flank
countries" are at present more endangered and more critical for
the Alliance than ever. Doubts have increased, especially about
the effectiveness of massive nuclear threats as a substitute for
conventional force.)

569

The Second-Strike Theory

Another line of research that was pursued intensively in
classified form, beginning in 1951, disclosed a different but even
more urgent range of problems about the sturdiness of nuclear
deterrence. This research, which generated the second-strike
theory of deterrence, looked at the vulnerabilities of all the essential
elements of strategic nuclear forces under nuclear attack, and the
problems these entailed for maintaining a convincing deterrent.
These problems had been badly neglected in part because the
original belief after World War II that nuclear weapons could
be used effectively only against cities predisposed political and
military leaders, as well as scientists, to overlook the possibility
that our own nuclear force might come under attack; also because
bombing doctrines during and before World War II had stressed
that the chief aim of strategic forces was to destroy the centers of
war-supporting industry and not the military forces themselves.

As a result, the force we had planned for the mid- and late-
1950's, before the introduction of ballistic missiles, was much
more vulnerable than is generally realized even today. That was
dangerous in particular because NATO had always counted on the
help of the Strategic Air Command (SAC) to deter or oppose an
invasion of Western Europe and to reduce the intimidating political
shadow cast by the possibility that an invasion might grow out
of some future crisis. A strategic force, however powerful when
left undisturbed to do its work, cannot deter an attack which it is
unable itself to survive; and the studies showed that we needed
to protect not only the vehicles but all the complex elements of an
effective response, including in particular a politically responsible
command-and-control. Moreover, preserving control required
operating in peacetime in ways that avoid a large risk of lethal
"accidents" or even more lethal mistakes in response to false
alarms. It excludes, for example, "launching under attack," a
euphemism for launching ICBM's on ambiguous electromagnetic
signals.

Popularizations of the second-strike theory and some recent
academic accounts distort history to make it seem essential
deliberately to threaten innocents rather than military forces in
order to deter. They frequently identify a second strike with attacks
on civilians. In its origins the second-strike theory assumed no
such identity. The study that generated the distinction [between
first- and second-strike] and first specified requirements for

570

a second strike, the Rand Base Study, in which I was engaged
between 1951 and 1953 with Fred Hoffman, Harry Rowen, and
Robert Lutz, made explicit that it would not deal with how to
choose targets, but rather how to choose a protected mode of
basing and operating a strategic force that would be best for any
of several target systems. It looked at several target sets typical
of the time: a quite limited number of key war plants supporting
combat; military targets whose destruction might retard the
advance of ground forces in Europe; and those that might blunt
a continuing enemy strategic attack. It did so in order to show in
all cases how best to reduce the vulnerability of our own strategic
forces. That was the more important result, but the study also
saved 9 billion 1953 dollars, showing that one does not have
to aim to destroy cities only, or to destroy cities at all, to avoid
"exponential" increases in defense spending, as one implausible
rationalization for bombing innocents has it.

The authors' next long study, started at the end of 1953,
was about defending a strategic force in the coming ballistic-
missile era of reduced warning — then seven years or so off. It
paid particular attention to "fail-safe methods" of avoiding war
through mistaken responses to ambiguous signals and to the
difficult issues of protecting political command-and-control.
However, like the Base Study, it dealt only with the urgent
problem of choosing responsible ways to protect SAC, not with
choice among SAC's targets. Separating targets for SAC never
looked harder than in the mid-1950's, since our bombs were then
at their most destructive and expected inaccuracies near their
anguishing worst. However, in successive later studies of strategic
aims, the authors became increasingly clear that to have only the
alternative of indiscriminate attack would seriously compromise
the credibility that there would be any response at all. The two
lines of research, one on targeting and reducing collateral damage
and the other on protecting the strategic force, converged. It had
become apparent that to have a persuasive deterrent, we had not
only to be able to protect command-and-control, but also to have
some alternatives which a responsible political leader would be
willing to command.

Imprecision and Unintended Harm

The recognition at the end of 1953 that fusion warheads might
be made small enough to be carried in ballistic missiles by the
1960's might have seemed to hold out the prospect for reducing

571

collateral damage somewhat. For these first ballistic-missile
warheads were expected to be substantially smaller than the
gravity bombs carried in aircraft. (Later Navy SLBM warheads
were about the same size as some early A-bombs, 40 kilotons.
Even the first SLBM and ICBM warheads were about a half-
megaton, much smaller than the H-bombs contemplated in the
initial debate.) In fact, however, the prospect of the ballistic missile
worsened expectations about collateral damage because the first
generation of missiles was expected to be much more inaccurate
than aircraft. The median miss distance then expected for the first
ballistic missiles was anywhere from two to five miles. A five-mile
median radius of inaccuracy meant that half the bombs would
strike outside of an 80-square-mile area!

But inaccuracy determines the unintended harm done in
destroying a small target more basically than does the explosive
yield of individual bombs. It is the lack of technology smart
enough, rather than the availability of large brute-force single
weapons, that lies at the root of the problem of collateral damage.
One makes up for incompetence in aiming by filling an enormous
area of uncertainty either with a few large-yield nuclear weapons
or, as the British did in World War II, with many thousands of
small conventional bombs. When the British discovered in June
1941 that only a third of the bomber crews who thought they
had bombed the target were within 80 square miles of it, they
resorted to huge raids involving thousands of bombers with
results that became visible in Hamburg and in Dresden. David
Irving' s estimate of the dead in Dresden came to 135,000 — much
more than the official estimates of the Hiroshima dead. A single
American conventional raid on Tokyo in March 1945 destroyed
an area over three times that destroyed by the Hiroshima bomb
(15.8 compared to 4.7 square miles) and nearly nine times that
destroyed by the Nagasaki bomb (1.8 square miles). The average
area destroyed in 93 conventional attacks against Japanese cities
amounted to the same as that in Nagasaki.

During the postwar period the prospects for reducing
collateral damage seemed at their worst in the late 1950's when
the average explosive yield of a bomb was ten times the present
level and when anticipated missile inaccuracies were also at
their maximum. Some of the most familiar and perverse current
views on nuclear deterrence, including those that have shaped
the pastoral letter, were formed at that time. Since then, the
prospects of hitting only what one is aiming at have changed

572

by several orders of magnitude. That implies improvements in
effectiveness against small, hard fixed targets that are in some
ways more revolutionary than the transition from conventional
to fission explosives or even fusion weapons. The fission and
fusion revolutions blasted themselves, so to speak, into public
awareness. Revolutionary improvements in our ability to focus
destruction on targets alone have proceeded quietly and attracted
less public notice and understanding.

The fact is, however, that a tenfold improvement in accuracy
is roughly equal in effectiveness to a thousandfold increase in the
explosive energy released by a weapon. Improving accuracy by
a factor of 100 improves blast effectiveness against a small, hard
military target about as much as multiplying the energy released
a million times. The fission bomb at Hiroshima released about a
thousand times more energy, and a 10-megaton fusion bomb can
release a million times more energy, than a 10-ton conventional
"block buster." A one-hundredfold improvement in accuracy
roughly equals in effectiveness a millionfold increase in the
release of destructive energy to enable the blast destruction of a
small fixed target.

The Revolution in Precision

But while the improvement in effectiveness may be the same,
these two technologies achieve it in essentially different ways.
When one improves effectiveness by releasing more destructive
energy, there is a corresponding increase in collateral damage.
When one improves the ability to destroy a target by increasing
one's accuracy, there is a corresponding decrease in collateral
damage.

Improvements in guidance using midcourse adjustments
have already reduced cruise-missile inaccuracies to 200 feet
from the 12,000-30,000-feet average misses expected for ballistic
missiles in the late 1950's. That improvement by a factor of 60 to
150 makes feasible radical reductions in collateral damage. Even
more important, terminal guidance systems in development
now that can be deployed in the late 1980's could further reduce
inaccuracies at extended ranges by another order of magnitude.
That would permit a conventional weapon to replace nuclear
bombs in a wide variety of missions with an essentially equal
probability of destroying a fixed military target. It would
drastically raise the threshold beyond which one would have to

573

resort to nuclear weapons in order to be effective. It would mean
a much smaller likelihood of "escalation" and incomparably
smaller side effects.

Destroying ground targets that might decide a conventional
conflict could have much more troubling side effects even in
relatively isolated areas than the destruction of equally decisive
naval forces at sea or key satellites deep in space. Yet the situation
has altered greatly here too. Most such land targets are less blast-
resistant than ICBM silos. Yet attacking them effectively with the
huge inaccuracies expected in the late 1950's would have meant
filling an enormous area of uncertainty with destruction. That
might typically have subjected an area of 1000 square miles or so
to unintended lethal effects. By contrast, a current cruise missile,
with midcourse guidance and a small nuclear warhead, could be
equally effective against a military target while confining lethal
damage to less than one square mile. Most important, improved
terminal guidance in the next few years could enable a cruise
missile with a suitable non-nuclear warhead to destroy a military
target and reduce the area of fatal collateral damage to about one-
thousandth of a square mile — an enormous contrast with World
War II.

Some conservative critics counter the bishops' strictures
against a nuclear response to conventional attack by suggesting
that any "conventional war in Western Europe would almost
certainly mean terror and destruction far in excess of World
War 11" — with perhaps 100 million dead; that, in short, any
conventional conflict in Europe would bring on horrors hardly
less terrible than nuclear war. Such expectations lead many
Europeans to feel that even a conventional war would destroy
Europe and end Western civilization. For the bishops, a policy
of No-First-Use follows from the broader nuclear policy of "Use,
Never." And both are only part of Cardinal Krol's injunction in his
White House sermon against all war. ("No more war, war never
again.") Through all the political compromises in various drafts,
the bishops support conventional alternatives only grudgingly.
But estimates of conventional damage by the bishops' critics have
even less basis in evidence than those the bishops cite to show that
nuclear damage would be unlimited. It is plain that the increasing
advances in precision and control can be most fully exploited by
suitably designed conventional weapons.

It is essential to emphasize that advances in our ability
to reduce collateral damage and increase the effectiveness of

574

conventional weapons do not blur the distinction between nuclear
and conventional force. On the contrary, that remains vital. But
these revolutionary changes make it much more feasible to avoid
crossing the divide between nuclear and conventional weapons.
They give us choices.

Discussions of the morality of bombing and deterrence today
often proceed as if "the technical realities" foreclose choice (as
one eminent physicist, Wolfgang Panofsky, suggests), as if "the
mutual hostage relation" were not at all a "consequence of policy
and therefore . . . subject to change," but a matter of physics —
permanently determined by the technology for releasing nuclear
energy. Yet the evolution since the 1950's of technologies other
than the release of nuclear energy has altered the possibilities of
discrimination and will not excuse us from the responsibility for
preparing to keep violence from mounting without bounds.

Ill

With few exceptions, even the most thoughtful considerations
of the morality of nuclear threats have beenf rozen in the technology
of the late 1950's and specifically that of nuclear brute force. This
can be shown by referring to the evolution of NATO policy, to the
development of technologies of destruction and of discrimination
and control, and to a sequence of substantial analyses of the
morality and prudence of threats to bomb innocents between the
end of the 1950's and the present.

Terror and Technology at the End of the 1950's

Robert W. Tucker's book. The Just War (1960), observed that
the policy of nuclear deterrence in the 1950's had demonstrated
"at least a striking verbal insensitivity" to the consequences of
the defensive use of nuclear force. Indeed, "the more extreme
versions" were "obsessed" with the idea that the deterrent threat
would never have to be carried out and therefore regarded "the
effectiveness of deterrence as directly proportionate" to its horrors.
If one accepted this extreme, then one had to acknowledge that "in
the nuclear age . . . virtually no substantive restraints . . . need to be
observed by those waging a defensive war." But Tucker himself
leaned toward the extreme, since he thought no restraints would
be effective. He was writing when the average destructiveness
of our weapons and the expected inaccuracies, and hence the
probable unintended harm, were all near their peak.

575

Indiscriminateness, he suggested, is a "'necessity' that is
inherent in technology." He rejected the position taken by the
World Council of Churches in 1958 against "all-out" use of
nuclear weapons. As Paul Ramsey observed. Tucker agreed with
the pacifists that statecraft in the nuclear age entails using evil
means — threats whose execution would inevitably exterminate
civilians. He parted company with the pacifists because the
pacifists would abandon statecraft. Tucker would rather abandon
morality. His concluding paragraph argued: "There is something
patently absurd in the complaint that a threat of extermination,
even when restricted to preventing one's own annihilation,
signifies a moral decline for which there is no explanation other
than that men have deliberately chosen to abandon any sense
of restraint. If men presently show less restraint in threatening
their adversaries, it is largely because they are less secure than
in an earlier age." But during the 1950's, doubts grew about the
credibility and the political and military implications of threats of
extermination and about whether there were no better choices.

The McNamara Doctrine of the First Two Years

The view dominant among the Kennedy administration
and its advisers during its first two years embodied the two
converging lines of research on the protection of the strategic
force and its targeting. It put into effect many of the criticisms
of massive retaliation that had accumulated during the 1950's. It
stressed the importance of a second-strike capability, including a
responsible command-and-control system with its vulnerabilities
reduced, for example, by the use of airborne command posts. But
it also called for a conventional build-up to reduce reliance on
nuclear weapons and contemplated the use of nuclear force itself
only with discrimination and restraint in the service of political
ends. Both conventional and nuclear force, neither of which could
substitute for the other, would have to be used in limited ways, if
we were to deter aggression, or frustrate it should it occur.

Alain Enthoven defended the continuing relevance of the
traditional Christian doctrine of "just war" in the context of
the initial Kennedy policy. He explicitly rejected the "realist"
and pacifist views of deterrence, both of which assume the
incompatibility of morality and statecraft in the nuclear age. We
do not, he said, have to choose one or the other. The realists would
eliminate moral restraints because they believe them impossible

576

or suicidal. The pacifists think that the impossibility of restraint in
nuclear war proves what they had believed all along, that the only
moral course is to disarm totally, even if unilaterally, and that this
would bring universal peace.

Enthoven distinguished his view also from the obsessive
extreme which Tucker had in mind — the position known
sometimes by the euphemisms "Minimum Deterrence" or
"Deterrence Only." Enthoven noted that this view, which had
begun to take hold among academics after Sputnik (1957),
resembled that of the pacifists in its belief that a lasting peace
was feasible in the short term. But Deterrence Only would base
stability on threats to respond to an attack on our strategic force
by deliberately bombing enemy civilians, by avoiding enemy
military targets, and by exposing our own civilians to attack. The
core of this newer view, as he might have noted, was therefore an
antithesis both of pacifist nonviolence and of the Christian and
other ethical traditions of humane warfare.

It also differed drastically from preceding U.S. policy. In
one sense the new dogma seemed to return to the immediate
postwar understanding of nuclear weapons. But the typical view
after Hiroshima held that the number of either side's nuclear
weapons would be intrinsically so small and the individual
bombs so destructive that they could be effective only against
large population centers. An aggressor could effectively attack
only cities. His victims could effectively retaliate only against the
aggressor's cities. Deterrence Only, on the other hand, accepted the
fact that strategic forces could bomb military forces, but held that
we should threaten to respond to a nuclear attack only by bombing
cities, and that we should leave our own cities undefended. It was
remarkable not only for its extreme departure from humane
ethics, but also because it represented a 180-degree turn by many
of its main proponents, who, for nearly a decade before they
adopted this dogma, had proposed using nuclear weapons only
against military targets — in continental defense against invading
bombers, against ground forces in Europe, and against combat
ships at sea — and who had recommended immense deep-shelter
programs for civil defense. Deterrence Only was an extreme
minority view at the time of Enthoven' s writing. After the Cuban
missile crisis, it became an established ideology.

It was in a speech at Ann Arbor, Michigan, in June 1962 that
Robert McNamara made public that, in a nuclear war growing out
of a major attack on NATO, our main goal would be to destroy

577

enemy military forces, not civilians. He added that we could
reserve enough power to destroy the enemy's society, "if driven
to it," and that threat would give him "the strongest imaginable
incentive to refrain from striking our own cities." (This last resort,
which some moralists questioned at the time, I believe was
unnecessary: the Soviets have the strongest incentives to preserve
their military power.) The part of McNamara's speech about
restricting, so far as feasible, the use of strategic forces to military
rather than civilian targets, was embedded in statements stressing
that American military force was designed only to discourage
aggression, not to change the status quo and never to initiate a
war; and that the United States was reducing reliance on nuclear
weapons in general and wanted to discourage their spread.

Despite these cautions, his speech produced a strikingly
negative response from conservatives as well as liberals both
here and abroad, and from keepers of the traditional morality of
"just war." McNamara's harsh didactic style can hardly explain
it. Rather, a certain ambivalence about, if not affection for, nuclear
terror had become nearly universal. Franz Josef Strauss, then
West German Defense Minister, made clear that he continued to
believe that deterrence depended on threatening the immediate
use of tactical nuclear weapons at the battle line, to be followed
quickly by massive strategic retaliation. Senator Richard Russell
and Senator Margaret Chase Smith, Democratic and Republican
stalwarts respectively on the Senate Armed Services Committee,
denounced McNamara's statement. Some scientists and engineers,
who had only recently, in the aftermath of Sputnik, turned to
relying on threats to bomb cities and away from advocating the
use of nuclear weapons against military forces and from massive
continental defense and deep-shelter programs, now pronounced
any ability to attack military forces or to defend cities to be
"destabilizing." With a rancor suggesting a bad conscience, they
said that the very modest Kennedy fallout-shelter program, and
the new official focus on military targets rather than massive
retaliation, might influence American leaders to initiate preventive
nuclear war. This, though members of the administration had
abundantly stated the very opposite and had explicitly recognized
that any nuclear war would be an "unprecedented catastrophe."

578

*****

It was plainly silly to suppose that American political leaders
would be eager to unleash such an unprecedented catastrophe
simply because it might not be total. The reaction was all the
more striking since neither these critics nor anyone else had
ever suggested that the much more costly and supposedly more
effective programs the critics had been backing a few years earlier
(for nearly leakproof air defenses, a thick ballistic-missile defense
of population as well as of strategic forces, extensive deep shelters
for civilians, and the limitation of nuclear weapons to legitimate
military targets) would induce American leaders to undertake
preventive war. All in all, the venomous response, including that
of the media, was shallow, partisan, and, not infrequently, in
bad faith. Such venom unfortunately continues to poison current
debate as to whether there is an alternative to suicide or surrender.
It takes great civic courage to sustain that burden and, in the
detente that started after the missile crisis, the administration
did not show such courage. Nonetheless, every one of the last six
Secretaries of Defense has found it essential both to rely less on
nuclear weapons and to return to the subject of the limited use of
long- as well as short-range nuclear forces against military targets.
Much of Paul Ramsey's work on "just war" (brought together in
The Just War: Force and Political Responsibility, 1968) is related to
such a policy.

Ramsey's answer to Tucker states that the conduct of a nuclear
war need not — and, if it is to be moral, must not— "violate the
moral immunity of noncombatants from direct attack." Any harm
to noncombatants should at least be unintended. He implies,
moreover, that the conduct of nuclear war should involve a serious
effort to minimize such unintended damage. If he had been more
aware of the possibilities implicit in the electronic revolution, he
might have added that research and development need to aim
at improving the ability to discriminate. He insists that attacks
should not only attempt to discriminate but that the unintended
damage should be proportionate to any good that would come
out of the war.

In a chapter on "The Limits of Nuclear War," Ramsey
considers what actions in a nuclear war are "undoable" even if
they are "thinkable." He notes that McNamara's announcement
at Ann Arbor that our main aim in responding to an attack on the
Alliance should be to destroy the enemy's forces, not his civilian

579

population, had occasioned hardly a single amen on either side
of the Atlantic. The only responses were stereotyped objections
from defense establishments here and abroad, and the same
from publications like the Christian Century, normally regarded
as keepers of such a civilized rule. Ramsey proceeds with a
brilliant support of such limitation and with a sympathetic but
penetrating critique of Thomas Schelling and Herman Kahn, who
favored limiting nuclear war, but included under those limits
attacks on cities, and who held that it might be rational to threaten
such attacks even though it would be irrational to execute them.
Limited attacks on military installations and forces are both
thinkable and doable, according to Ramsey; but a direct attack on
innocent civilians to achieve some other goal, even a good goal, is
wrong. Like art, a political action has consequences beyond itself,
but, as Aristotle pointed out, an action is also right or wrong in
itself. Attacking innocent civilians is wrong even to accomplish
something else. Ramsey rejected the use of threats of even limited
city attacks.

Enthoven criticized such threats on the ground also that they
would not be believed; that policies based on "the rationality of
irrationality" (on which Father Hehir and the bishops also rely)
are not viable in the long run for a democracy, especially one with
allies: "Rather, the most credible kind of threat is the threat that
we will do what in the event will be most in our interest to do."

According to Michael Walzer, in just and Unjust War, Ramsey
relies on unintended "collateral civilian damage from counterforce
warfare in its maximum form to deter potential aggressors."
Walzer himself believes that to deter one must intentionally or
unintentionally threaten to kill innocents. But Ramsey was not
referring in that context to deterrence of the initial outbreak of
an aggression. He was talking of the possibility that, during a war
waged against military targets on both sides, both sides might avoid
attacking cities and also avoid a maximum counterforce attack —
in order to prevent the collateral damage that would ensue from
attacking even military targets that are closely co-located with
population centers. That is very different from saying that to deter
an initial attack one must threaten civilians — even unintentionally.
Nor does selectivity in attacks on military targets during a war
mean threatening civilians, but rather the opposite. Ramsey did
sometimes falter by recommending a "studied ambiguity" about
our intentions to retaliate in kind to an attack on cities. Michael
Novak's answer to the bishops also finds "the best of the ambiguous

580

but morally good options ... in a combination of counterforce and
countervalue deterrence." Yet even he is affected by the insidious
semantics of MAD: "countervalue" suggests the Soviets value
only bystanders, not military force. But to deter we need rely
neither on unintended harm nor on ambiguous intentions.

McNamara, MAD, and MADCAP

One difficulty in getting the evolution straight of both official
doctrines and operational policies on nuclear weapons is that
the two have often diverged, and the statements of doctrine
have often been designed for political combat within domestic
bureaucracies rather than potential combat with the Soviets.
McNamara in his first two years as Secretary of Defense sought
options between suicide and surrender, according to Stewart
Alsop, "as Parsifal sought the Grail." Out of office, he has ended
ironically by foreclosing all such options. With an intensity that
dims his memory as well as his understanding, he doubts that any
nuclear response to nuclear attack can limit destruction.

After the missile crisis, McNamara often talked of Assured
Destruction— and later Mutual Assured Destruction — as if they
were serious operational policies. Neither was. While Secretary,
he never abandoned the goal of using strategic forces against
Soviet military forces or the goal of limiting harm to American
civilians. Even as declaratory doctrine he never stated MAD in the
unqualified and brutal Orwellian form of the aphorism "killing
weapons is bad, killing people is good." When he talked about a
capability for assured destruction of 20-25 percent of the Soviet
population, he was thinking of deterring the Joint Chiefs of Staff
from asking for higher budgets rather than the Soviets from
attacking the U.S. It was his way, if not the best way, of winning
a budget battle and putting a lower ceiling on the size of our
strategic forces. He stressed that we would have the capability for
destroying the Soviet population — and he expected that capacity
to deter the Soviets; but if deterrence failed, we would use our
strategic forces to destroy Soviet forces attacking the United
States. Later, when he drifted toward regarding it as desirable for
the Soviets to deter us, he was still talking about capabilities.

In short, the form of MAD doctrine he introduced can best
be described by the acronym MADCAP rather than MAD.

581

McNamara said we would use a MAD capability for deterrence
without seriously intending to assure the destruction of enemy
noncombatants. Nor was he entirely serious about attacks on com-
batants. MADCAP did not lead to any persistent thought about how
to improve the force to make it increasingly discriminating, and
it discouraged thinking about the selection of various theater and
other military targets suited to proportionate responses. It led to
slowing or stopping various programs that would have increased
our ability to discriminate between military and civilian targets.
It made us less serious about the problems of nuclear targeting of
combatants or noncombatants: it avoided some of the obloquy of
seriously threatening to do the cheap and easy job of killing large
"soft" concentrations of civilians without forcing thought about
the harder job of carefully selecting and, if necessary, destroying
military targets without killing bystanders; or about the hard but
feasible and necessary job of keeping violence under control.

The bishops, their defenders, and the strategists on whom
they rely all talk of the uncontrollability of nuclear weapons as
a deplorable but unavoidable fact of life. However, they make a
virtue of this supposed necessity. John Garvey, columnist for the
Catholic Commonweal, knows that one may not threaten what one
does not intend to do, and grants that "if your enemy knows that
you will absolutely refuse to use a weapon, what you have is no
longer a weapon and is therefore useless"; but he claims that "it
would be naive to think that we are so fully in control of ourselves
that in the event of an attack we would not say. 'What the hell,' and
hit them with everything we've got." Which apparently would
give the threat, however immoral, some use as a deterrent.

However, it would be naive or worse to suppose that we
cannot impose controls over both initial and subsequent uses of
nuclear weapons. "Permissive action links," which we place on all
our weapons overseas and which microchips and other electronic
advances are constantly improving, can make it essentially
infeasible for military commanders to use nuclear weapons
without release by a remote political authority. Moreover, if we
really thought political authority were reckless, we could make
this release mechanism as elaborate as we liked and even divide
the releasing codes so that they would require the agreement of
many parties. But the processes of consultation in the Alliance
are now complex, and would affect not only the initial, but also
subsequent releases. It is most unlikely that we would simply say
"Wheel" and let everything go. In Europe the problem is quite the

582

opposite. We should not and do not rely on the threat of losing
control to deter either nuclear or conventional attack. But MAD
and the fictions of uncontrollability it has propagated encourage
us to rely on the threat of losing control as a substitute for dealing
with the dangers of conventional conflicts. In short, they have led
us to be less serious about conventional war as well.

The bishops' strategists, who believe that one can deter even
if one is plainly committed never to use nuclear weapons, first,
second, or ever, would maintain a capability but never use nuclear
weapons at all. McNamara, when he changed from the doctrine
of his first two years to talk of capabilities for mutual assured
destruction, said he would maintain the capability to kill Russian
civilians but would actually use nuclear weapons against certain
military targets. That's rather different. Nonetheless it was a long
step on the way to the present absurdities and evasions of the
moral and prudential problems of discouraging a nuclear attack
on the U.S. or one of its allies. Or a conventional attack.

Soviet Values and MAD 'Nuclear Threats to Deter Conventional
Attack

Michael Walzer writes perceptively about the use of terror by
guerrillas to provoke counterterror against innocents. But when
it comes to nuclear weapons, he accepts the MAD stereotype
about the use of threats of terror against innocents to deter attack.
He doesn't question the technical determinism of the nuclear
technologists that limiting harm to civilians on either side is
impossible. He advances comfortably the familiar paradox about
"the monstrous immorality that our policy contemplates" but
thinks it inevitable. "The unavoidable truth is that all of these
policies rest ultimately on immoral threats." Like Tucker, Walzer
is unwilling to give up immoral threats because he thinks they are
necessary for deterrence. Here he rests on the baseless judgment
that the only thing that will deter Soviet aggression is the prospect
that Russian bystanders will be killed.

To reject that view one need not assume that Soviet values are
the same as our own; nor that the Soviets are simply monsters who
don't care or even like to see civilians killed. We need only observe
that the Soviets value military power and the means of domination
at least as much and possibly more than the lives of Russian
civilians. This is surely evidenced by a long history documented
by careful scholars like Adam Ulam, Robert Conquest, Nikolai

583

Tolstoy, and many others, in which the Soviets have sacrificed
civilian lives for the sake of Soviet power. Their collectivization
program in the 1920' s gained control over the peasants at the
expense of slaughtering some 12-15 million of them. (Stalin told
Churchill that the great bulk of 10 million kulaks had to be wiped
out or transferred to Siberia.) The Soviet government sharply
increased grain exports during the famine year of 1933, when
5 million Ukrainian peasants were dying. If Robert Conquest is
right, the Great Purge of the late 1930's killed several million more
Soviet citizens. If Nikolai Tolstoy is right, Stalin and the NKVD
were responsible for more than half of the 20-30 million deaths
suffered by the Soviets during World War II. Soviet refusal to
abide by the Geneva Convention on Prisoners of War doomed
many additional Soviet as well as German prisoners.

Whatever else one may say of these actions, they do not suggest
that Soviet leaders value the life of Russian citizens above political
and military power. If the West responded to Soviet military
attack by destroying military targets, it would affect something
on which Soviet leaders continue to lavish a huge part of their
painfully scarce resources and which they appear to cherish quite
as much as they do Russian citizens; and the prospects of such a
Western response would be the best deterrent to their initiating
war. Moreover, continued attacks during a war on elements of
their military power and means of domination would appear to
be the best way to bring the war to a rapid close. Prudence does
not force us to rely for deterrence on even unintended damage done
to civilians. Discrimination remains an important goal during the
war — and an important capability to achieve in advance of the
war. It helps deter the war or bring it to an end.

But Walzer believes that "counterpopulation deterrence" is
basic. He also believes it is perfectly effective. It "rules out" (i.e.,
makes so unlikely as to be negligible) any nuclear war between
the great powers; even though the Soviets know we believe that
nuclear attacks on populations would be suicidal, our threat
would be sure to deter them. And, typical of his time, he is also
quite comfortable about the effectiveness of counterpopulation
deterrence for forestalling a conventional invasion. His
complacency here parallels that expressed in various British
and American magisterial writings of the late 1960's and 1970's.
He quotes with approval a passage from Bernard Brodie: "The
spectacle of a large Soviet field army crashing across the line
into Western Europe in the hope and expectation that nuclear

584

weapons would not be used against it — thereby putting itself and
the U.S.S.R. totally at risk while leaving the choice of weapons
to us — would seem to be hardly worth a second thought. . . ."
One may surmise that if Brodie were alive he would be having
second thoughts. Many who wrote that way in the late 1960's and
1970's are less comfortable today, in particular about threatening
mutual annihilation as a way of deterring a conventional attack
on Western Europe.

*****

McGeorge Bundy illustrates the change in the American
establishment. He had chided Henry Kissinger for expressing
public doubts on the credibility of American strategy for the
protection of West Europe at Brussels in 1979. "American strategy
for the protection of West Europe," he was satisfied, was "a classic
case of doctrinal confusion and pragmatic success." (He inserted
the two words "so far," suggesting he was not completely
satisfied.) I cautioned at the time that it would be a great mistake
to attribute the pragmatic success to the doctrinal confusion; and
Bundy did not disagree. The protest movements in Europe were
already visible, for one thing; for another, there were the Soviets,
and they might not be confused just because we were. We cannot
count on a Mutual Assured Confusion. In any case, Bundy, less
confident now about MAD threats to deter conventional invasion,
has joined Robert McNamara, George Kennan, and Gerard
Smith in proposing that we exchange pledges with the Soviets
that neither would be the first to use nuclear weapons. The four
stress the No-First-Use pledge much more than any serious
and extensive program to improve the size or quality of NATO
conventional forces, so that NATO could depend less on nuclear
threats to overcome Soviet advantages in the use of conventional
force. These advantages have to do not only with the massive and
increasing size and quality of the Soviet force, but with the Soviets'
geographical position and their relatively improving access to air
space and bases near critical areas. Japan and Korea as well as all
our European allies are within immediate range of Soviet, but far
from the center of American, conventional power. So is Persian
Gulf oil on which they all have come to depend.

Indeed, it seems that Bundy and his three co-authors have
not really abandoned an implicit threat of the first use of nuclear
weapons to make up for our conventional disadvantage. For

585

while the four may mean the Western pledge [of no-first-use],
they rely on the Soviets not trusting us to live up to our pledge
and so continuing to keep their ground forces dispersed and less
effective for conventional attack and defense. In short, the policy
they advocate resembles the pastoral letter in explicitly abandoning
a nuclear threat, while implicitly continuing to rely on it. In their
case, the threat is implicit in NATO's continued capability to
use nuclear weapons first. If their policy led each side to believe
the other's pledge, the Soviet Union would be more likely to
concentrate its conventional force effectively — and safely since, on
their recommendation, we would keep our pledge. On the other
hand, if we trusted the Soviet pledge, we might concentrate our
defenses at the likely points of attack. That would not be safe since
NATO has no way of enforcing such a Soviet pledge. It seems that
the four want neither side to believe the other's pledge. In sum,
recommendations for exchanging unenforceable pledges about
the first use of nuclear weapons in Europe do not reduce the
doctrinal confusion that has been troubling NATO even on the
subject of nuclear deterrence of conventional attack. They only
alarm West European leaders who continue to rely excessively on
nuclear weapons.

Many have observed that the four are rather perfunctory
about a program to improve NATO conventional forces — in size,
quality, method of deployment, or strategy— which would make
it less necessary for European leaders to rely on nuclear weapons
by making it more likely we could defeat by conventional means
any of several plausible Soviet conventional attacks. They do
talk of "maintaining and improving the specifically American
conventional forces in Europe" but claim, in the face of much
evidence of an unanticipated worsening in our ability to defend
Europe's interests in more than one critical area near the Soviet
periphery, that we tend to exaggerate Soviet relative conventional
strength. And they say we underestimate "Soviet awareness of
the enormous costs and risks of any form of aggression against
NATO"— which is to rely covertly on the threat of first use of
nuclear weapons that they overtly abjure.

*****

Recently Bundy and McNamara have joined Cyrus Vance
and Elmo Zumwalt in a letter to the Congressional Budget
Committees calling for large cuts in the administration's FY '84-

586

FY '89 defense budget — with two-thirds of the dollars cut coming
out of conventional programs. Like some drafts of the pastoral
letter warning that an "upward spiral even in conventional arms
may lead to war," and saying that "we do not in any way want to
. . . [make] 'the world safe for conventional war,' which introduces
its own horrors," their budget letter warns of the dangers of
"spurring the arms race." What is more, the conventional arms cuts
it recommends are squarely incompatible with reduced reliance
on the early first use of nuclear weapons or indeed with any
coherent view of potential critical conventional conflicts. It plans
for only a short conventional war, cutting in half the program for
increasing the number of days of stocks of "modern conventional
munitions" in Europe. But it would cancel the C-5B program for
rapid airlift and depend much more on the comparatively slow
sealift that would be important in a long conventional war. It
would focus the Navy largely on the defense of the sea lines of
communication in the North Atlantic, yet drastically cut Navy
programs important for defending these sea lines, such as those
permitting long-range precise conventional attacks on the Soviet
naval air bases from which Backfire bombers could menace both
the sea lines and ships defending them.

I do not doubt the earnestness of the authors' desire for a
more than nominal decrease in NATO's reliance on nuclear
weapons. I can testify that Robert McNamara's interest goes back
at least twenty-two years. I was his representative on the Acheson
Committee which drafted the National Security Council decision
formally to end the U.S. policy of massive retaliation in the spring
of 1961. That decision called for raising the nuclear threshold by
preparing a capability to defeat at its own level all but a very
massive conventional attack; and the use of nuclear weapons
only if our increased conventional force did not suffice. But as the
stormy reaction to the McNamara doctrine of his first two years
indicated, NATO's threats of first use showed its reluctance to
spend the resources needed for an adequate conventional defense
rather than any convincing willingness actually to use nuclear
weapons quickly or at all. Moreover, though McNamara doubted
the utility of battlefield nuclear weapons, to quiet the political
storm he did not resist sending several thousand more tactical
nuclear weapons to Europe, making a stockpile there of 7,000.
And contrary to his recent memory, he increased our total stock
of nuclear weapons until it reached its peak in his last year as
Secretary. When six years after the Acheson Report the Europeans

587

did agree to "flexible response," it was a grudging compromise —
agreeing on the need for improved conventional forces but
insisting that the main defense would be nuclear. That tended
to undercut the seriousness with which they or we attended to
the problem of improving NATO's conventional ability to defend
itself against conventional attack.

Carl Kaysen, McGeorge Bundy's former deputy as National
Security Adviser, in his influential contribution to the 1968
Brookings study. Agenda for the Nation, contemplated a No-First-
Use pledge, but also called for large cuts in defense including
the halving of U.S. ground forces in Germany. Senator Mark
Hatfield and Senator William Proxmire, eager to freeze nuclear
weapons then as now, led the battle to cut conventional arms.
All that may seem bizarre, but it is not. The wave of "study
groups" that deplored "exaggerations" of the Soviet build-up and
the supposed spiraling of U.S. strategic budgets that forced the
Soviets unwillingly to follow our lead, continued to set national
priorities toward more social spending. But not much social
spending could be got out of strategic budgets. They had been
spiraling not up but down at 8 percent a year. By the early 1970's,
they were less than 1 percent of GNP, and by FY '76, less than
one-half of 1 percent. The Soviet deployment of ICBM's, SLBM's,
and heavy and medium bombers averaged twice as great as the
"greater-than-expected" threat predicted by Defense Secretaries
for ten years starting with Secretary McNamara. Now, once more
with program cuts in mind, the Bundy et al. budget letter talks of
"greater-than-expected" threats and, like the bishops, resurrects
the old apparition of our spurring an arms race by doing too
much.

From the beginning of the 1960's to the late 1970' s, the U.S.
and all its major allies, while prattling about a U.S. -driven arms
race, halved defense budgets in percent of GNP, while the Soviets
steadily spent more in real terms for conventional as well as nuclear
forces. As a result, NATO found itself continuing to rely on the
early and first use of nuclear weapons, while the "correlation of
forces" was changing so as to make that less convincing than ever
before.

If the anti-nuclear movement in West Europe has served
any useful function at all, it has done so by making responsible
West Europeans more aware of the recklessness of depending
on apocalyptic nuclear threats to meet conventional attacks.
And given Europe's economic problems, key Western leaders

588

are forced to think not merely of multiplying brute numbers but
also of exploiting the new intelligent technologies to increase
the effectiveness of the resources used. Such an effort has been
hampered up to now by a kind of Luddite and moralistic resistance
to qualitative improvement and by a particular antipathy to
technologies that improve the possibility of discrimination and
choice.

*****

Moralists who have chosen to emphasize the shallow
paradoxes associated with deterrence by immoral threats against
population have been at their worst when they have opposed any
attempts to improve the capability to attack targets precisely and
discriminately. While they have thought of themselves as aiming
their opposition at the dangers of bringing on nuclear mass
destruction, they have often stopped research and engineering on
ways to destroy military targets without mass destruction; and
they have done collateral damage to the development of precise,
long-range conventional weapons. (Junior Congressmen like
Thomas Downey and Edward Mar key, who had their fun with talk
of Star Wars in March, might have benefited from observing that
Luke Skywalker used one accurately placed weapon to destroy
the indiscriminately destructive Death Star. And with advanced
terminal guidance we need not rely on "The Force.") They have
tried to stop, and have slowed, the development of technologies
which can free us from the loose and wishful paradoxes involved
in efforts to save the peace with unstable threats to terrorize our
own as well as adversary civilians.

The events leading to the destruction of German and Japanese
cities in World War II offer parallels. British scientists, when the
menace of Hitler overcame their natural distaste for arms research,
formed a Committee for the Scientific Study of Air Defense which
backed Watson Watts' s development of radar for the defense
of Britain. Their distaste was not overcome enough for them to
support as energetically the Committee for the Scientific Study of
Air Offense, whose work was quite desultory. The lag in develop-
ing radar for navigation and bombing, however, did not prevent
the bombing of German targets. It only assured that the raids
would destroy more German civilians. Some blame lies with the
Royal Air Force' s failure to improve accuracy in the period between
the wars. Marshall Trenchard, relying on the special experience

589

of strategic bombing in clear weather against undefended targets
in Iraq, thought British accuracy in general excellent. In 1928 he
argued, "What is illegitimate, as being contrary to the dictates
of humanity, is the indiscriminate bombing of a city for the sole
purpose of terrorizing the civilian population." Citing the draft
code of rules for air war drawn up at the Hague in 1922-23, he
held that air attacks were legitimate — "provided all reasonable
care is taken to confine the scope of the bombing to the military
objective. . . ." But he hardly took reasonable care to improve
discriminateness before the war. (A minor fault, compared to that
of religious strategists who testified to Congress against "targeting
systems that minimize collateral damage to civilian life" and
against any defense of U.S. civilians.) Trenchard's opposite
numbers in the British Army and Navy had doubted that the state
of accuracy in 1928 would permit either the effectiveness or the
discrimination that Trenchard claimed. During World War II,
when he found how poor its aim was, Trenchard advised that if
Bomber Command missed its intended targets it would still kill
Germans and so do good work.

Declaratory doctrine for the American defense of Europe
started in the 1950's with the belief that strategic and tactical
nuclear weapons could replace the conventional firepower
which our NATO allies hesitated to supply against conventional
invasion. It went through a phase in which many of the present
advocates of MAD entertained exaggerated hopes for limiting
the harm done by the large-scale use of tactical nuclear weapons
on European battlefields; and for using massive active and
civil defense, limiting to quite small amounts the damage done
by a large raid on U.S. cities. When their hopes began to seem
excessive, they switched to the view that the threat of unlimited
mutual destruction was actually good, since it was nearly sure to
deter even a conventional invasion. The last year or two have seen
signs of a renewed serious interest in improving NATO's ability
to meet a conventional invasion in Europe on its own terms.
Manfred Woerner, the current Minister of Defense in the German
Federal Republic, has set forth a program which is designed not
only to discourage a Soviet conventional invasion, but to do it
responsibly in a way that will also put to rest the growing West
German anti-nuclear movement. He would exploit the advanced
technologies that are coming to be available for that purpose.

Woerner' s view stands in contrast to that of his predecessor,
who held that even a conventional war in Europe would be "the

590

end of Europe," and that it was essential that tactical nuclear
weapons be used quickly but only as a link to the "intercontinental
exchange" —which would be "the end of the world." But anyone
who relies on such threats to deter a conventional attack is likely
to threaten up to the last minute and then, when it would have
become clear that the Soviets did not believe that NATO leaders
would consciously bring on the end of Europe and then the
end of the world, rush to reassure the Soviets that they did not
really mean to execute the "threat." Such a policy, Herman Kahn
accurately labeled "preemptive surrender." It differs from the
policy advocated by West Germany's party of the Greens in the
anti-nuclear movement who would make their accommodation
with the Soviets now, in time of peace, safely in advance of a
threatened Soviet attack. Pierre Hassner has characterized the
difference between the leaders of the anti-nuclear movement and
some leading figures in the West European establishment who
rely on suicidal threats: it is the difference between "preventive
surrender" and "preemptive surrender."

Deterring Nuclear Attack on an Ally

Bundy, McNamara, Kennan, and Smith have lost their faith
in suicidal threats as a way of deterring a conventional invasion.
They believe in the necessity and adequacy of such threats to deter
nuclear attacks. However, a hope that an adversary can be safely
deterred by our threat to blow him up along with ourselves, is
unfounded not only for a conventional attack but also for a nuclear
attack on the ally.

Consider a strategically placed ally like Norway with an
American nuclear guarantee and no nuclear weapons of its
own. How would a capability to destroy Soviet civilians, along
with American civilians and possibly the civilization of Europe
itself, discourage Soviet use of nuclear weapons against military
targets in the course of an attack aimed at seizing the sparsely
populated but strategic northernmost counties of Norway?
No one— no Norwegian, no American leader, and no Soviet
leader — would seriously expect us to respond to such an attack
by consciously initiating the killing of 100 million or so innocent
Soviet civilians and a corresponding number of Americans and/
or West Europeans. That is one reason why some believers in

591

MAD are explicitly /or threats and against their execution. But a
capability which plainly will never be used to initiate a chain of
events we believe would lead to the end of civilization will terrify
an adversary no more than a capability that would destroy half,
or a tenth, or a millionth the number of civilians, or no civilians
at all. The only way weapons can inspire concern is by the
likelihood that they will be used. The residual fear that the West
might deliberately blow up the world tends to terrify some in our
own elites much more than the Soviets who chatter less on this
subject.

The Incoherence of "Deterrence Only" Even for Deterring Nuclear
Attack on Oneself

Dogmas of "Minimum Deterrence" and "Deterrence Only"
had their origins in the late 1950' s in the writings of General Pierre
Gallois. Gallois believed that nuclear weapons spelled the end of
alliance: no nuclear guarantee to a non-nuclear ally was credible
since no nation would commit suicide for another. His version of
Minimum Deterrence formed the center of his justification for the
spread of nuclear weapons to any nation, even very small ones
that wanted protection against nuclear attack or coercion. Initial
American variants of the Minimum-Deterrence doctrine in 1958
cited some of Gallois's principal arguments and the calculations
he had designed in order to prove the necessity for targeting cities
rather than opposing military forces; and some 1958 American
writings on Minimum Deterrence recommended distributing
Polaris submarines to NATO allies to replace the American
guarantee. However, the incoherence of the Deterrence Only view
is thorough and applies to deterring an attack on oneself. If it is
true that a nation will not commit suicide for another, neither can
it commit suicide to assure its own survival. Suicidal threats are
in general not a reliable means of dissuasion.

Yet the total separation of threat from any possibility of
execution has been common in establishments abroad as well as
here, even among those who would maintain the Alliance. A former
associate director of that pillar of the European establishment,
the International Institute of Strategic Studies (IISS), talked in
much the way Father Hehir does. Father Hehir holds that nuclear
weapons exist "to be not used; their purpose is to threaten, not to
strike." Ian Smart, then of IISS, has said that "nuclear weapons
are exclusively destined to deter" and suggested that only certain

592

misguided American hawks view them "as reasonable and
effective" for fighting. An instrument that destiny or purpose
plainly made unreasonable and ineffective for actual use, and
thus sure to remain unused, could hardly deter. It would make
war more likely, not less.

William O'Brien's 1981 book. The Conduct of Just and Limited
War, while a painstakingly honest and informed inquiry into the
circumstances in which war is justified and into its discriminate
and proportionate conduct in a wide range of historical conflicts,
is less incisive on MAD. He gives a little credence to the possibility
that at least a one-sided abandonment of the threat against
innocents might be destabilizing, and, though he is aware of the
possibilities, he appears to underestimate the actual progress in
technologies that gives us a choice between destroying military
targets and destroying innocents. However, he is right on the
mark in his more recent writings answering the Deterrence Only
version of the pastoral letter proposed by Father Hehir and the
Jesuit Father Francis Winters.

O'Brien is blunt about the insanity of deception labeling itself
deception, as does the doctrine of Deterrence Only. Father Winters
has an enthusiastic explication of the pastoral letter as opting "with
notable casuistic ingenuity for possession of the strategic arsenal
along with renunciation of the intention to employ it." O'Brien
responds that, "given the centrality of credibility to deterrence
. . . this proposition is insane. What is needed is not casuistic
ingenuity, but a serious commitment to face the dilemmas of
nuclear deterrence without recourse to escapist diversions."

As for Father Hehir, he is aware of but troubled by the fact that
some nuclear weapons are less destructive than some conventional
ones. He has argued on the basis of "psychological criteria" that
we may continue to threaten to use nuclear weapons but should
ban their actual use because he wants to solidify in our minds
the dangers of crossing the gap between conventional and nuclear
weapons. He wants to set up a psychological barrier against our
ever using them. Unfortunately, like the lay strategists who are
his model, he is less concerned to set up a psychological barrier
against the use of nuclear weapons by our adversaries. Assuring
them that we would never use nuclear weapons, even in response
to a nuclear attack, cancels the deterrent and, for them, opens up
a psychological expressway.

One can see why "casuistry," which once meant dealing with

593

cases of conscience and the resolution of questions of right or
wrong in conduct, acquired a bad name and came to refer to the
trivial and false application of moral principles to make things
seem like their opposite. The upholders of the bishops' doctrine
of "Use, Never" (i.e.. No Use — First-Second-Or Ever) seem
unaware that an adversary might be concerned not only about
the magnitude of the harm we threaten but about the likelihood
that we will inflict it.

However, it is a familiar fact of everyday life that we consider
implicitly in our behavior not only the size of the assorted
catastrophes we might conceivably face when we get up each
morning but also their likelihood. Blizzards in August might find
us peculiarly unequipped to survive them. So also sunstroke in
December. Neither bothers us much, nor leads us to wear furs
in summer and carry parasols in winter. Even when we face
adversaries and not merely environmental dangers, we have a
way of arraying threats according to the probability that they will
be carried out and not only in terms of the damage they would do
if they were. When a threatener can execute a terrible threat to us
with little harm to himself, we worry more than when he would
suffer at least as much as we would. Moreover, when a threatener,
who expects to destroy himself and his allies along with the
aggressor, says that he has no intention whatsoever and, in fact,
would regard it as immoral to execute his threat, this can only be
reassuring to a potential aggressor. It is an invitation rather than a
deterrent. Somehow it does not occur to those who hope to deter
by a suicidal threat (which they loudly proclaim they will never
execute) that they may be doing the opposite of deterring. Their
policy is — to use that dread catchword — "destabilizing."

Soviet leaders who were not deterred by a threat they knew
would never be executed would not, as Cardinal Krol suggests,
have to be insane. It seems more nearly insane, as O'Brien says, to
hold that in all circumstances, even during a stalled conventional
invasion when all alternatives looked risky to them, the Soviets
would be deterred "beyond question" from using nuclear
weapons by our self-confessed suicidal bluff. Nonetheless, the
doctrine of "Use, Never" advanced by the bishops merely makes
more explicit the operational meaning of secular strategies of
Deterrence Only. The Stanford physicist, Sidney Drell, recently
has repeated the standard jumble about deterrence and fighting:
instead of observing that our threat to fight back will dissuade an
opponent only if he thinks we are able and if necessary willing

594

to fight back, Drell says deterring and fighting are incompatible
goals.

*****

Deterrence only focuses on deterring Western responses
rather than Soviet attacks. It assumes that it is really the West,
and especially the United States, in its misunderstanding of the
Soviets, that menaces the nuclear peace and not the Soviets. This
is an assumption widely held, even by those who oppose the
disarmers. Michael Howard of Oxford tells us that the Soviets
are entirely satisfied with the present division of Europe and
that only Western extremists are not. He grants that the Soviets
would revise the rest of the world, but doesn't notice that in that
process they might effectively alter the division of power within
West Europe too. It would be hard for the Soviet Union to avoid
altering the division of power in Europe, even if unintentionally,
if it seized some future opportunity to satisfy its long expressed
interest in expanding toward the Persian Gulf and the Eastern
Mediterranean. (England is said to have acquired its empire in a
fit of absentmindedness.) Moreover, from the Soviet point of view,
the destruction of the Western alliance that would result would
surely be a bonus in defense of Soviet Western borders. George
Kennan draws rather more satisfaction than is warranted from
Soviet paranoid defensiveness. Paranoids can be dangerous.

But Michael Howard isn't terribly worried about the Soviets
beginning a war. He worries about Americans. Though he has been
subject to attack by E. P. Thompson and the nuclear disarmers, he
sometimes sounds a little like them. He says: "Whether I could
encounter the same phenomenon in the Soviet Union, I do not
know. But wars begin in the minds of men, and in many American
minds the flames of war seem already to have taken a very firm
hold." And: "When I hear some of my American friends speak of
that country [the Soviet Union], when I note how their eyes glaze
over, their voices drop an octave, and they grind out the words
'the Soviets' in tones of gravelly hatred, I become really frightened;
far more frightened than I am by the nuclear arsenals themselves
or the various proposals for their use." I know some of Howard's
American friends (indeed have counted myself as one), but
none resembling that description. If such glazed-eyed monsters
controlled the U.S. arsenal, instead of planning proportionate
Western responses that might credibly discourage Soviet attack.

595

the West might focus its attention entirely on stopping us and let
the credibility of U.S. guarantees erode.

Unfortunately, the reactions to the President's speech of March
23 on protecting civilians showed that the view of some Americans,
indeed of some former Cabinet officers firmly attached to MAD
doctrine, resembles that of Michael Howard. These Americans,
like their British counterparts, may deplore the "oversimple"
view of Soviet leaders which they attribute to American "hawks."
But when seized by MAD dogmas their view of U.S. leaders is
more outrageously simple. They suppose American leaders to be
so wantonly unconcerned about the unprecedented catastrophe
of nuclear war that they are very likely to start one in any grave
crisis. Anyone professing to believe that finds it even easier to
believe that an American President would casually unleash
nuclear war if he thought that American civil society had some
substantial protection. But it is absurd to think that American or
Soviet leaders are straining at the nuclear leash.

*****

Former Defense Secretary Harold Brown answered the
President with a variant of the fantasy that American hawks
are likely to unleash nuclear war if they think the U.S. has a fair
chance of coming out gravely but not totally ruined. The bishops
cite him in support of their view that there is "an overwhelming
probability that a nuclear exchange would have no limits." While
in office. Brown was torn between, on the one hand, the view
forced upon him by evidence that Soviet arms had been going
up while ours went down and, on the other hand, the view that
both superpowers are engaged in a spiraling build-up incapable
of yielding either side the ability to fight, to coerce, or even to
gain some political advantage. Thus "the Soviets have as great
an interest and should have as great an interest in strategic arms
limitations as we do." And he oscillated between the MAD
dogma that all either side needs is to be able to destroy the other
as a "functioning modern society" — an implicit pact for mutual
suicide — and the recognition embodied in Presidential Directive
59 that the Soviets have made no such pact and shown no desire
to make any possible Soviet attack an act of suicide. Like Hamlet
(and McNamara) he is "but MAD north-northwest; when the wind
is southerly, he knows a hawk from a handsaw." But now the
political winds blow more from the north and Brown's American

596

leaders are amazingly susceptible to clever briefers:

Deterrence must leave no doubt that an all-out nuclear
war would destroy the nation— and the leadership — that
launched it. Realistically we must contemplate deploy-
ments by both superpowers, investing huge amounts in
such defensive systems. If a clever military briefer, in a
time of grave crisis, with such systems in place, can per-
suade the political decision-makers that the defensive
systems, operating together with other strategic forces,
had a reasonable chance to function well enough to re-
sult in even a severely damaged "victor," the scene will
have been set for the ultimate disaster.

One might suppose that leaders on either side might be given pause
if they thought that they would be completely destroyed even if
the nation were not. But evidently the American leaders Brown
contemplates wouldn't mind that and would be easily swayed
by a military briefer who told them that the nation would have a
reasonable chance of coming out only "severely damaged."

The United States could have launched a nuclear attack on
the Soviet Union during any of several crises that came up while
we had nuclear weapons and they did not. For example, we had
50 nuclear weapons and they had none in 1948 at the time of
the Berlin crisis. It would not have taken a very clever military
briefer to convince our leadership that the United States would
not be destroyed by a nuclear attack in 1948. Yet since McNamara
introduced the notion that it was very important for the U.S. that
the Soviets be able to threaten the U.S. with annihilation of its
cities, the absurdities implicit in MAD have become gospel even
with intelligent men like Harold Brown.

The United States never seriously considered an attack on the
Soviets when it had a nuclear monopoly; nor for many years after,
while Soviet nuclear forces were extremely vulnerable. The idea
that it would launch nuclear aggression now is a fantasy worthy
only of the conspiracy theorists in the disarmament movement.
Nor should we take seriously the idea that the Soviets tremble in
fear that the United States might launch a nuclear attack simply
because it had deployed some defense of innocent bystanders.

Many analyses in the 1960's related the use of our strategic
forces to the objective of limiting harm done to ourselves and our
allies in case deterrence should fail; and they related deterring an

597

adversary to the ability to harm him if we responded. McNamara's
Annual Posture Statements after the missile crisis, for example,
tended to treat these two aims as independent. However, the
separation misconstrues the problem of deterring. In a war, when
all alternatives may be extremely risky to an adversary, we may
not convince him that the alternative of nuclear attack is riskier
than the others if we have persuaded him also that it can be done
safely because we won't retaliate for fear of the unlimited harm
we would bring on ourselves. We only complete the absurdity
and undermining of deterrence when we say that we have no
intention to fight, that is, to use nuclear weapons if deterrence
fails. Unfortunately, the principle of deterrence and the principle
of "Use, Never" mutually annihilate each other.

Declaring — or telling oneself —that one does not really mean
to use nuclear weapons if deterrence fails is one way of stilling
uneasiness about threatening to kill innocents in order to deter.
Another standard way of softening guilt is to say that the West
should continue to raise such a threat even implicitly only if it is
making serious progress toward the total elimination of nuclear
weapons. That, however, does not lie solely within the West's
power. It depends on others who have or may acquire nuclear
weapons, and in particular it depends on the disposition of the
deeply suspicious, hostile leadership of the Soviet Union.

For a brief time in the immediate aftermath of Hiroshima,
some Western leaders talked fervently about world government
and the need to sacrifice national sovereignties to assure world
peace. British Prime Minister Clement Attlee invoked "an act of
faith" by the United States, the United Kingdom, and other nations,
and "a new valuation of what are called national interests."
Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson "spoke continuously about a
way to use nuclear energy for other things 'than killing people' "
and of "the changed relation of man to his universe." It is easy
to understand and sympathize with their initial emotional
reaction to the enormous destruction released at Hiroshima and
to feel their disappointment as Soviet behavior made evident
that such hopes were Utopian. But thirty-eight years later, the
Utopian hopes expressed by Jonathan Schell and others are more
obviously groundless. Since then, Soviet behavior has made clear
many times that Soviet versions of Utopia differ from our own.

598

The Soviets see the lasting independence of Western democracies
side by side with their own system as a permanent danger to its
maintenance, not to say its expansion toward an international
Utopia. Meanwhile, there is little evidence that some plausible
arrangement would lead them to surrender so powerful an
instrument of coercion or defense. That, after all, was indicated
in their rejection of the Baruch-Acheson-Lilienthal plan for
international control of atomic energy. Stalin exhibited none of
the anguish sincerely felt by Western leaders and none of their
momentary hopes for a world authority governing Communist
and non-Communist nations side by side. The contrast of his
private view with that of Western leadership is illustrated by the
accounts of such privileged and reliable witnesses as Milovan
Djilas: "He spoke of the A-bomb. 'That is a powerful thing, pow-
er-ful!' His expression was full of admiration. . . ."

Nor have Soviet leaders since Stalin shown any lesser aware-
ness of the value of nuclear weapons as an implicit or explicit
means of intimidation in a hostile world they do not dominate.
Their value is only enhanced by the contrasting Western scruples
on the same subject. If Western political as well as religious leaders
take Western possession of nuclear weapons as justified only if
there is progress toward agreement with the Russians to eliminate
them altogether, they place in Soviet hands the decision as to
whether the West will continue to maintain a nuclear deterrent.

Not all differences are negotiable. Pretending that they are
suggests a willingness to disarm unilaterally — either because
the Soviets prevent agreement or because they agree only to
a disarmament which would be purely nominal for them but
real for the West. The Greens in West Germany look forward to
the total elimination of nuclear weapons and their immediate
withdrawal from Eastern and Western Europe. They are not
noted for their realism. However, they reject Reagan's zero option
for intermediate nuclear forces in Europe as "unrealistic," even
though it would seem to be a substantial step on the way to their
own goal. Petra Kelly and Manon Maren-Griesbach, two of their
principal leaders, explain that the zero option is "unrealistic"
because the Russians would never agree to it. It is therefore "not
even an honest step toward arms reduction." But the inconsistency
of the Greens and their willingness to see the West accommodate
to an unwavering Soviet aim to increase Soviet advantage does
not differ substantially from many in the West who complain
that the American government has not been able to convince the
Soviets that we are sincere.

599

Paul Ramsey has understood very well what was involved
in Western tendencies to take agreement with adversaries as
an absolute essential. He questions the "omnicompetence of
negotiation" and observes about some statements in Pacem in
Terris that there can be hope in negotiations only if these proceed
"from inner conviction" that, if such statements mean that "the
way to conduct negotiations is not to permit them to fail," then for
any single nation to adopt that way of negotiating would mean
"its premature surrender. ... It takes two to negotiate in any such
fashion."

*****

The view of the present administration on this subject is,
at best, mixed and sometimes lacks conviction. The President
has said "it takes two to tango." But when The New York Times
editorialist, who apparently thinks the impulse for social dancing
is universal, said "So Tango!," and when the American Catholic
bishops proposed negotiating rather than responding to the Soviet
build-up, the administration tended mainly to justify its programs
as the best way to get agreements. Implicitly, the administration,
then, seems to see no escape from the holocaust except by agreeing
with the Soviets. But this particular apocalyptic view also has no
basis in fact.

We should recognize that Utopian hopes for total nuclear
disarmament cannot excuse a Western failure to defend
its independence soberly without using reckless threats.
Unfortunately, our elites now link the phrase "arms control" not
only to millennial dreams of early complete nuclear disarmament,
but to the strategy of using threats to annihilate cities as a way of
deterring attack; and to a perverse myth of the "arms race" that
suggests that nuclear war is imminent because our nuclear arms
have been spiraling exponentially and will continue to do so unless
we limit our objectives to the destruction of a fixed small number
of vulnerable population centers. (No one has ever suggested that
the only way to avoid an exponential race in conventional arms
is to train our fire on villages rather than enemy tanks. But when
it comes to nuclear arms our elites will believe almost anything.)
That is not the "arms control" Donald Brennan had in mind.
"Arms control," as he and the Princeton physicist. Freeman Dyson,
have understood it, should aim at the more traditional and more
sensible goal of restraining the bombardment of civilians. But the

600

phrase is now loaded with wishful and mistaken prejudices. It
suggests that without arms agreements our spending on defense
inevitably will rise exponentially and uncontrollably; and that with
arms agreements Soviet arms efforts will diminish. Experience for
nearly two decades after the Cuban missile crisis illustrates the
opposite.

A serious effort to negotiate agreements with the Soviets
might enable us to achieve our objectives at lower levels of
armaments than might otherwise be possible. (Improved active
defenses, as J. Robert Oppenheimer observed, could facilitate
such bilateral agreements since they would make us safer from
cheating or assaults by third countries.) Being serious about arms
agreements, however, is not the same as being desperate. Even
without agreements the West is quite able to deter war and defend
its independence against a formidable and persistently hostile
adversary committed, as the Soviet Union has been, to changing
the "correlation of forces" in its favor. The contrary view is deeply
pessimistic and ultimately irresponsible, leading easily to treaties
and "understandings" which only worsen the situation of the
West.

For a serious and indeed sincere pursuit of arms negotiation
by the West calls for a sober assessment of how any arrangements
contemplated in an agreement are likely to affect the West's long-
term objectives of security and independence, and its intermediate
objective of redressing the balance which worsened during the
period of detente. These are not merely technical matters. The
actual results of arms negotiations have, in the past, contrasted
sharply with our expectations and desires. The negotiations of
the last two decades started with Western expectations that the
agreements achieved would reduce arms spending on both sides
without any change in the balance. We assumed that the Soviets,
like ourselves, had, as a principal objective, the desire to reduce the
percentage of their resources devoted to arms spending and that
they would choose "arms control" rather than arms competition.
The record plainly shows that Western assumptions were wishful.
The Soviets pursued arms agreements as a method of limiting
Western spending — which did decline as a proportion of GNP
by nearly half in the period after the missile crisis — while they
themselves steadily increased their spending and did succeed in
changing the balance. Now the West has the problem of catching
up and that is especially hard to negotiate.

601

*****

Serious negotiations today must recognize the limits to
what they can accomplish. We and the Soviets share an interest
in avoiding mutual suicide, an interest which each of us will
pursue whether or not we reach genuine agreement in various
understandings and formal treaties. But the Soviets also have
interests in expanding their influence and control and, in the
process, destabilizing the West, if necessary by the use of external
force rather than simply by manipulating internal dissension.
Arms agreements might temper, but are unlikely to eliminate,
this reality. In particular, there seems scant basis to hope for
major economies in our security effort through negotiated limits
or reductions.

Experience suggests that when the Soviets agree to close off
one path of effort, they redirect their resources to other projects
posing differing but no lesser dangers. On the other hand, many
of the ostensible goals of arms agreements are best achieved
through measures which we can and should implement on our
own. Our current efforts — which a freeze would stop — to design
and deploy nuclear weapons which are more accident-proof and
more secure against theft or unauthorized use, are a good example.
Measures to improve the safety, security, and invulnerability of
nuclear weapons can be implemented by both sides individually
because they make sense for each side independently of formal
treaties or elaborate verification measures. These need not mean
a net increase in the numbers or destructiveness of nuclear
weapons in our stockpile. The United States has already greatly
reduced both the megatonnage and the numbers of its nuclear
weapons. It recently removed 1,000 weapons from Europe and
has said that if, in accordance with NATO's decision in 1979, it
installs 572 intermediate-range nuclear missiles, it will withdraw
an equal number of warheads. If we increase precision further,
we can drastically further reduce the number and destructiveness
of our nuclear weapons. Increased precision can also improve
the effectiveness of conventional weapons so that they may
increasingly replace nuclear brute force. And it would improve
our ability to avoid the unintended bombing of innocents with
nuclear or conventional warheads. It would enlarge rather than
foreclose our freedom to choose.

602

But many strategists in our foreign-policy establishment
prefer to foreclose choice. The orthodox view, expressed by editors
of our magazines dealing with foreign affairs, liberal Senators,
scientists, and many former officials, holds that any use of nuclear
weapons by us will almost surely end in a disaster leaving almost
everybody dead or worse than dead; yet that we should have no
alternative other than to threaten the bombing of cities; and that
we should therefore make clear to our adversaries and allies that
we will never fight a nuclear war. Anyone who holds that as the
true faith will want to believe that he has no other choice. If he
cannot say, like Flip Wilson, "The Devil made me do it," he can
introduce the deus ex machina of technology: Nuclear Technology
makes me do it. He is likely to be outraged by any heretic who
dares suggest we might have choices.

The grand inquisitors on the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee had Kenneth Adelman on the rack recently during
the hearings on his appointment as director of the Arms Control
and Disarmament Agency. They probed to find some trace of a
doubt in him on the question as to whether we should try to be
able to limit nuclear destruction. Dostoevsky would have been
fascinated. His Grand Inquisitor, a venerable Jesuit who had had
Christ seized on the streets of Seville, argued with the savior that
his mistake was not to recognize that men cannot bear the burden
of free choice. That's a point on which many in our establishment
have impaled themselves.

ENDNOTES - Wohlstetter - Bishops, Statesmen, and Other
Strategists

1. In the final version of the article, "80 one-megaton" was
printed as "100 one-megaton." Albert Wohlstetter wrote a letter
to the journal's editor to correct this error. See Wohlstetter, "Let-
ter to Norman Podhoretz, editor of Commentary," June 16, 1983,
Albert and Roberta Wohlstetter Papers, Writings, Box 180, Folder
Vi. — Zarate

2. Wohlstetter had intended "after Hiroshima" to be added
after the word "immediately." See ibid. — Zarate

603

Connecting the Elements of the Strategy:
Excerpt from Discriminate Deterrence (1988)

From Discriminate Deterrence, final report of the Com-
mission on Integrated Long Term Strategy, Washing-
ton, DC:U.S. Government Printing Office, January 1988,
pp. 63-69, available from www.albertwohlstetter.com/
writings/DiscriminateDeterrence.

The Enduring Aims of U.S. Policy

We live in a world whose nations are increasingly connected
by their economies, cultures, and politics— sometimes explosively
connected as in the repeated vast migrations since World War II
of refugees escaping political, religious, and racial persecution. It
is a world in which military as well as economic power will be
more and more widely distributed and in which the United States
must continue to expect some nations to be deeply hostile to its
purposes.

The United States does not seek to expand its territory at the
expense of the Soviet Union or any other country. Nor do any of
our allies present a danger of an invasion of the Soviet Union or the
territories it dominates. The Soviets, nonetheless, insist that we,
our allies and other countries, the weak as well as the powerful,
do threaten attack. Such Soviet suspicions or assertions have been
inherent in their system of rule: they need to posit a hostile world
to establish the legitimacy of their regime. We would, needless to
say, welcome a basic change in their antagonistic stance.

However, even if perestroika and glasnost signal an intention
to make that change, it will not be easy to accomplish. Moscow's
suspicion and hostility are rooted in 70 years of Soviet and 400
years of Tsarist history. Relaxing their hold on the countries they
dominate on their borders can threaten their control of dissident
nationalities within their borders. We should not deceive our-
selves. The Western democracies cannot do much to advance the
process simply by persuading the Soviets that we are not about
to attack them, or by trying to shed any capability for offense —
and thus for counterattack. Such efforts would merely reflect
misunderstandings of the internal role played by external threats
in Soviet rule; and might encourage aggression. The Soviets feel
threatened by the autonomy of the free countries on their border.

The United States has critical interests in the continuing
autonomy of some allies very distant from us — in Europe and

604

the Mediterranean, in the Middle East and Southwest Asia, in
East Asia and the Pacific, and in the Western Hemisphere. We
use bases, ports and air space in helping these allies defend
themselves and one another. In some cases, where the danger to
them from an adversary close by is especially great, it has been
a durable element of U.S. strategy to deploy our forces forward.
We do this, however, at the invitation of allies who are sovereign
and independent of us and on conditions that they name. They
can always ask us to leave. In some cases they have; and unlike
the Soviets, we have always complied.

The fact that we lead sovereign allies who can differ from
us in their interests in various circumstances and places has
direct implications for defense; it means that even where there
are gathering but ambiguous signs of danger to our common
interests, getting a cohesive allied response and bringing it to bear
in time to block the danger may be difficult. A dictator, or an
involuntary coalition dominated by a dictatorship, has less trouble
in preparing to launch military operations. And the Soviets are
not, and will not be, the only danger to our interests.

In the changing environment of the next 20 years, the U.S. and
its allies, formal and informal, will need to improve their ability
to bring force to bear effectively, with discrimination and in time
to thwart any of a wide range of plausible aggressions against
their major common interests — and in that way to deter such
aggressions.

We need to bring a longer view to the necessary day-to-day
decisions on national security. The next two decades are likely to
exhibit sharp discontinuities as well as gradual changes with effects
that are cumulatively revolutionary: major new military powers,
new technology, new sources of conflict and opportunities for
cooperation. To cope with these changes, we will need versatile
and adaptive forces.

An Integrated Strategy

Because our problems in the real world are connected and
because budgets compel trade-offs, we need to fit together
strategies for a wide range of conflicts: from the most confined,
lowest intensity and highest probability to the most widespread,
apocalyptic and least likely. We want the worse conflicts to be less
likely, but that holds only if our weakness at some higher level — or
the lack of a higher level response that democratic leaders would

605

be willing to use — does not invite such raising of the ante. For
genuine stability, we need to assure our adversaries that military
aggression at any level of violence against our important interest
will be opposed by military force.

More violent wars grow out of less violent ones, and locally
confined aggression (e.g., a Soviet invasion of the Persian Gulf)
could drastically alter the correlation of forces. And one cannot
completely separate "internal" and "external" conflicts. The
shadow of Soviet intervention could affect the outcome of an inter-
nal succession crisis in Iran for example. (In the past the Soviets
have used a puppet "Free Azerbaijan" to cloak their preparations
for intervention in Iran and Eastern Turkey, which they appear to
regard as strategically linked). Even terrorism can have a large
effect on our ability to meet greater dangers by destabilizing
vulnerable allies, dividing allies from each other, and dividing
public opinion at home.

Policy statements on deterring and on fighting aggression
should fit together. We cannot dissuade an attacker if he believes
we are not willing as well as able to fight back. Our will is called
into question by frequent statements about "mutual deterrence"
that imply that we want the Soviets to be able to deter the United
States unless the United States has been attacked. Such statements
undermine the essential pledge that we will use conventional,
and if they fail, nuclear weapons in response to a Soviet attack
directed solely at an ally. Similarly, the Soviet leadership might
be misled by statements, heard in Europe, that even winning a
conventional war would be "unacceptable." If such statements
mean that fighting with nuclear weapons would do less harm to
civilians than precisely delivered conventional weapons, or that
such conventional weapons would cause "more harm to civilians
than World War II," they are plainly wrong. If they mean that
the West would be unwilling to use either non-nuclear or nuclear
weapons, then they suggest we would not respond at all and
so erode our ability to deter an attack. The issue is about how
effectively to deter a non-nuclear or a nuclear attack. We and our
allies would rather deter than defeat an aggression, but a bluff is
less effective and more dangerous in a crisis than the ability and
will to use conventional and, if necessary, nuclear weapons with
at least a rough discrimination that preserves the values we are
defending.

Offense and defense (both active and passive) complement
each other at any level of conflict. Just as our offensive capabilities

606

can discourage an adversary from concentrating to penetrate
defenses, so active defense and passive defenses (such as
concealment and mobility) are mutually reinforcing.

Decisions on military systems are interconnected and ought
not to be dealt with piecemeal. The connections must be reflected
in arms negotiations, in force planning and in the definition of
military "requirements" during the acquisition process.

The Need to Consider a Wider Range of More Plausible,
Important Contingencies

Alliance policy and weapons modernization... have focused
largely on the two extreme contingencies of a massive Warsaw
Pact conventional attack and an unrestrained Soviet nuclear attack
aimed at widespread military targets, doing mortal damage.
The first contingency diverts allied attention from obligations
underlying the basic premise of the Alliance — that an attack on
one possibly vulnerable ally is an attack on all — and it ignores
the Soviet interest in inducing other allies to opt out. The second
contingency assumes the Soviets would have little concern about
inviting their own self-destruction, since it would leave us no
incentive to exercise discrimination and restraint.

However, Soviet military planners have shown an awareness
that if the Politburo uses military force, it has a strong incentive to
do so selectively and keep the force under political control. They
do not want their nuclear attack to get in the way of their invading
forces or destroy what is being taken over. And above all, they do
not want to risk the destruction of the Soviet Union. They recognize
as revolutionary for the nature of war the ongoing revolution in
microelectronics which makes possible the strategic use of non-
nuclear weapons. Their 40 years of investment in protecting their
national command system, as well as their careful attention to the
wartime uses of space and other means of command and control,
show they are serious about directing force for political ends and
keeping it under control. If we take the extreme contingencies as
the primary basis for planning, we will move less rapidly toward
a more versatile, discriminating and controlled capability.

It will always be possible to slip mindlessly toward such
an apocalypse, so we will always need to deter the extreme
contingencies. But it does not take much nuclear force to destroy
a civil society. We need to devote our predominant effort to a
wide range of more plausible, important contingencies.

607

Changes in the Security Environment

Our central challenge since World War II has been to find ways,
in formal and informal alliances with other sovereign states, to
defeat and therefore deter aggression against our major interests
at points much closer to our adversaries than to us. "Military
balances," i.e., matching numbers of NATO and Warsaw Pact
tanks, guns, anti-tank weapons, etc. (even adjusted for qualitative
differences in technology) fail to reveal the problem. The issue is
not simply one of distance, but of timely political access en route
to and in a threatened area, and of getting cohesive, preparatory
responses by sovereign allies in answer to ambiguous signs of
gathering danger.

The Atlantic Alliance has a problem of cohesion. In dealing
with countries like Nicaragua or Libya, it is perhaps not surprising
that the allies differ in how they conceive their interests. But even
on NATO's flanks and in the Persian Gulf, where the vital interests
of our European allies in blocking a Soviet takeover are more
direct and massive than ours, the problem has been worsening.
In recent base negotiations, Spain and Portugal have shown little
concern for their role in reinforcing Turkey or allied forces in the
Gulf. And some NATO countries on the Northern Flank, with
small military forces of their own, have opposed measures that
would help timely reinforcement for themselves; they justify
this opposition on the farfetched grounds that the Soviets need
reassurance that they will not be the victims of an unprovoked
attack. The increasing number of European advocates of "Non-
Offensive Defense" would carry reassurance further by eschewing
all "offensive" weapons. That would not prevent enemy attack,
but it would prevent counterattacking.

While our timely access has deteriorated sharply since the
1950s, the Soviets have used their internal lines of communication
to improve greatly their ability to bring conventional force to
bear quickly at points on their periphery and have systematically
improved their access to air space and bases near their periphery.
As a result, in some vital theaters such as the Persian Gulf, their
ability to bring force to bear has improved dramatically while ours
has declined in absolute terms. In the next 20 years and in other
theaters of conflict, increasingly well equipped smaller powers
as well as new major military powers are likely to give us still
stronger incentives to develop a more versatile and discriminate
force.

608

We have developed a variety of precise weapons, both long
and short range, and have taken important steps to improve
the robustness and effectiveness of our command, control,
communications and intelligence as well as the training of our
forces. Cumulative advances in microelectronics have already
had a revolutionary impact on the possibility of increasing the
effectiveness of attacks on military targets while confining
effects largely to these targets. The advances have enormously
improved the possibilities of large scale battle management and
the maintenance of political control. In the next decade or two,
they will do so even more. Most importantly, these cumulative
changes have made a single, or a few, nonnuclear weapons
effective for many missions previously requiring thousands of
nonnuclear weapons, or nuclear ones.

As stated elsewhere in this report, we would depend heavily
on space systems for the control and direction of our conventional
forces needed to defeat a Soviet invasion, and the Soviets would
use their own satellites as an essential support for their invasion.
Each side would have strong reasons to defend its own space
system and to degrade the other side's.

The dynamism of our private sector gives us an inherent
advantage in realizing the benefits offered by the new tech-
nologies. Nevertheless, we and our allies have often lagged in
actually fielding the capabilities needed to meet the increasingly
formidable dangers presented by the growing strength of the
Soviets and other potential antagonists.

Wars on the Soviet Periphery and in the Third World

We and the Soviets will have very large incentives to exploit
the greater effectiveness and discrimination of conventional
weapons afforded by the new information technologies and to
confine destruction so as to give the other side a stake in keeping
destruction within bounds. If nuclear weapons were used, both
sides would have even larger incentives to rely on technologies of
control, since losing control then would be most disastrous. Both
sides have devoted growing efforts to ensure the survivability of
their command and control under wartime conditions.

The equipment, training, uses of intelligence, and methods of
operation we have developed mainly for contingencies involving
massive worldwide attacks by the Soviet Union do not prepare us
very well for conflicts in the Third World. Such conflicts are likely

609

to feature terrorism, sabotage, and other "low intensity" violence.
Assisting allies to respond to such violence will put a premium
on the use of some of the same information technologies we find
increasingly relevant for selective operations in higher intensity
conflicts. The need to use force for political purposes and to
discriminate between civilian and legitimate targets is even more
evident here. In particular, we will need optical and electronic
intelligence, communications and control, and precise delivery
of weapons so as to minimize damage to noncombatants. We
will need advanced technologies for training local forces. These
will be important both for obtaining local political support and
support in the United States and elsewhere in the West.

The Northern and Southern Flanks of NATO are more
weakly defended than the Center. Both are of critical importance
for the Center's defense, but both suffer from political problems
which inhibit reinforcement in a timely manner. Defense of the
Northern Flank depends critically on rapid reinforcement from
the U.S. and the rest of NATO; yet increased restrictions on U.S.
and NATO activities in Norway limit our ability to bring force to
bear quickly in defense of the region. In the south, Turkey is of
key importance both in the defense of U.S. and other naval forces
in the Eastern Mediterranean and defense of our interests in the
Persian Gulf. Turkey's critical importance should be recognized
by increasing security assistance from the U.S. and from other
members of NATO as well as countries such as Japan that have a
vital interest in the areas Turkey would help to defend.

In the Persian Gulf itself, the great distances and political
difficulties involved in obtaining timely access must be overcome
to mount a credible defense of the region. Improvements in
technology, and a greater allied willingness to share the political
risks of getting such access, would greatly improve our ability to
deter attacks.

Both South Korea and Japan will be increasingly able to defend
themselves against a conventional invasion. The U.S. presence
in both countries works to discourage possible dangers, such as
Soviet (or Chinese) intervention or use of nuclear weapons, and
should be continued, not least because it is also of great importance
in increasing our capability to deal in a timely way with threats
elsewhere in the Western Pacific.

It has long been the policy of the Atlantic Alliance that if
non-nuclear force proves inadequate, we must be prepared to
use nuclear force to stop a conventional invasion. But this force

610

should be effective and discriminate — kept under control rather
than a suicidal bluff. We need in any case the ability to deter
plausible nuclear attacks on U.S. and allied forces. This should
include a large role in defending common interests outside
national boundaries and outside Alliance boundaries where, as in
the Persian Gulf, allied critical interests clearly coincide with our
own. A larger nuclear role in the defense of other European allies,
which has been suggested for the British and French, will require,
as in our own case, an effective and discriminate nuclear force
capable of use to defeat a Soviet invasion into allied territory. The
French and British now have options to move in that direction.

The Coherent Use of Resources for Security

We have lagged in fielding weapons systems needed to cope
with the increasingly capable forces of the Soviet Union and lesser
adversaries of the Third World. As the Packard Commission
has stressed, this lag has to do with cumbersome and unstable
acquisition and R&D funding procedures and the lack of adequate
and early testing. To overcome this lag, we should turn to faster
prototyping and testing of systems that would make our forces
more versatile and discriminate.

Equally important, however, will be clearly defined "require-
ments" that are related to a coherent national strategy. "Require-
ments" guided by a long-term strategy are critical to getting the
most out of a given budget.

The increasingly widespread latent dangers with which we
and our allies must cope do not justify the belief that we can safely
hold our defense budget level, much less reduce it. However, if
tighter budgets impose an increase in risks, we should, for the
near term, accept a greater risk of the unlikely extreme attacks,
in order to bring about a reduced risk of the more probable
conflicts, both now and in the future. Instead of giving priority
to buying various types of large "platforms," we should seek
continued improvement in the sensors and command, control and
intelligence systems which can multiply the effectiveness of our
ships and aircraft. And we must provide the resources needed to
maintain the training, morale, and excellence in leadership of the
men and women in the armed forces.

611

Arms Agreements and the Continuing Problem of Bringing
Discriminate and Timely Force to Bear Against Aggression

Carefully designed and enforceable arms agreements can
help reduce the risk of war by diminishing military threats for a
range of plausible contingencies while preserving, or facilitating,
our capability to keep the application of force discriminate and
effective. Recent proposals by the Soviets and some in the West
to stop the testing of missiles, nuclear warheads, anti-satellite
systems and active defenses have been based on the premise that
this would slow the qualitative arms race that is assumed to drive a
quantitative arms race. However, such restraints frequently would
have the opposite effect to that intended; they would make the job
of getting a credible deterrent harder. As explained elsewhere in
this report, a well-designed agreement on self-defense zones in
space could make it easier to protect the space-borne sensors, and
command, control and communications systems. An agreement
that would drastically reduce the Soviet advantage in non-nuclear
force has been proposed by leaders in both American Parties and
by many prominent Europeans. Its purpose would be to make
more equal the ability of NATO and the Warsaw Pact to bring
timely, effective force to bear at critical danger points. It would
thus address the basic East-West asymmetries due to geography
and the greater Soviet conventional effort.

The strategy recommended in this report should guide arms
negotiations as well as national and Alliance decisions on defense.
Such a strategy of discriminate deterrence seems in any case more
capable of building a community of interests with adversaries over
the long run than reckless threats to annihilate their populations.
Our arms control policy must be connected coherently to a viable,
long-term Alliance strategy.

612

RPM, or Revolutions by the Minute (1992)

Albert Wohlstetter

A previously unpublished address to the American
Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research,
Washington, DC, June 10, 1992, revised June 29, 1992,
available from the Albert and Roberta Wohlstetter
Papers, Speeches, Box 138, Folder 21. Courtesy of the
Wohlstetter Estate.

"Revolutions per Minute," of course, exaggerates. After years
of battering by headline and sound bite, it only seems we need
tachometers to measure ongoing rates of revolutionary change.
Nonetheless, the continuing technical changes, as well as their
political, economic and military consequences, have already been
genuinely revolutionary. Not media hype. They change things
by many orders of magnitude.

One technical change didn't need hype — the one that gave
the Cold War just ending its other name: The Atomic Age.
Nuclear fission and fusion completed the possibilities of releasing
energy from the atom. Together they multiplied the destructive
energy that a single weapon can release one million-fold and
the area it could obliterate indiscriminately about ten thousand-
fold. Fission and fusion announced themselves suddenly and
unmistakably: Hiroshima. Nagasaki. Bikini. Eniwetok. The
wartime annihilation of a whole city or the sinking, in what was
just a test, of an entire coral island was hard to miss. A glimpse of
the apocalypse.

Yet the less sudden continuing changes that make up
the Information Revolution dwarf in significance these two
spectacular leaps in nuclear technology. They transform military
security, politics within and among nations, the costs and
efficiency of market transactions and economic growth. The
technical changes are larger, and their effects more ramified,
more closely interconnected and much more important than the
changes worked by fission and fusion.

613

The advances in microelectronics and optics that underlie the
Information Revolution have been happening quietly over a long
period. They happen at an exponential rate small in any given
year compared to the big leaps in nuclear energy. But they've
been accumulating to much more.

The number of transistors on a chip has increased by a
factor of 100 every ten years. In 1989, chips the size of a child's
fingernail contained over a million transistors, performed many
tens of millions of instructions per second, and had reduced
costs per operation a million-fold in the preceding thirty years.
Such superscalar chips are being used to design new chips and
so accelerate this exponential rate of growth. In a decade, Intel
expects a chip with a billion transistors. All this speeds the
acquiring, processing and transmission of information.

One nice thing about the Information Revolution is that
something good — the spread of knowledge, which has no limits —
is increasing at an exponential rate. That contrasts with the typical
doomsdays announced, one after another, by natural scientists,
the Apocalypse Of The Month: Silent Spring, the Population
Bomb, the Exhaustion of Fossil Fuels, the Coming Ice Age, Nuclear
Winter, Global Warming, and others. Several doomsayers have
gained celebrity by announcing in quick succession Nuclear
Winter, the Coming Ice Age, and Global Warming — without
embarrassment, without troubling their primetime hosts, and
without damage to their celebrity status or their academic
careers.

In such predictions of global disaster, only something had
increases exponentially. The good, countering factors run against
a fixed limit— or increase only arithmetically — or at a lower
exponential rate.

A characteristic problem for policy choice raised by current
doomsday prophecies is that the predicted catastrophe may
be distant in time but is always vague and highly uncertain.
The actions urged are immediate, costly, risky — sometimes
desperate.

The granddaddy of all apocalyptic prophecies, of course, was
The Inevitability of Nuclear War. The argument ran that a global
holocaust was inevitable unless politics within and among nations
changed drastically and immediately: The arms race would
multiply nuclear weapons exponentially, and the probability
of war in any given year (unconsciously assumed to be fixed or

614

rising) would cumulate steadily until the holocaust was nearly
certain.

The argument had gaping logical holes. Yet it was made by
some splendid physicists, Russian as well as Western. And by at
least one great — or once great — mathematical logician, Bertrand
Russell.

The fathers of the Nuclear Revolution wanted the awful
prospect of a nuclear holocaust to shock political rulers, including
Stalin, into an end to secrecy and sovereignty. The stark choice
was One World — an open world— Or None. They believed that
civilian applications of nuclear energy would make that world one
of plenty; that they would revolutionize industry and transport
and that world politics would be transformed. But the release of
energy from the nucleus meant only a revolution in warfare, not a
revolution in transport and industry. Nor in politics.

Exaggerating the civilian benefits made Stalin less willing
to give up national civilian programs. Political openness is
simply incompatible with a Communist dictatorship. The huge
destructive potential of the atom only prompted an increase in
secrecy — the building of some 200 secret Soviet cities.

For a democracy, the ability to destroy a huge area indis-
criminately is usable only in desperate circumstances. And the
more indiscriminate the destruction, the less likely it is to be used.
This is especially so if one is responding to an attack not on oneself
but on an ally, and destruction is likely to be reciprocal. Academic
babble about suicide pacts couldn't change that. It did slow the
application of information technology to increase precision and
to reduce the yield and indiscriminateness of nuclear weapons.
But in any case, the precision revolution had its most important
application to nonnuclear force. Desert Storm demonstrated this
brilliantly, with missiles that destroyed the contents of a military
structure while leaving its walls standing and nearby buildings
untouched. And even more by the rapid destruction of artillery,
tanks and other heavy combat equipment on the battlefield — until
we stopped.

Desert Storm exploited only some of the advances in the
precise application of nonnuclear military force that had been
made since the late 1960s. Because we had been preoccupied
mainly with monitoring agreements on strategic arms and with

615

the contingencies of an all-out strategic nuclear attack on the
continental United States and a potential massive conventional
invasion through the center of Europe that we would feel compelled
quickly to turn nuclear, we were less adequately prepared to use
developments in information technology needed to forestall or
defeat less massive incursions in less obviously central theaters
of war. We had devoted much less thought and effort to buying
systems for delivering — at any range — nonnuclear explosives
against small fixed or moving military targets; and to acquiring
information on the exact location and vulnerabilities of small
military targets; and to communicating this information in the
theater. We had, for example, spent tens of billions of dollars on
reconnaissance satellites capable of intermittent observation and
detection of the changes that take place slowly, over a period of
years, in the throw weight of intercontinental missiles deep in the
Soviet Union — but very little on small, inexpensive, unmanned
airplanes that could provide continuous or frequent observation
of SCUD missile launchers moving in a theater of operations such
as the Persian Gulf.

Yet, research and development in the early 1970s could
have made such weapons and reconnaissance systems widely
available. We developed them, but frequently other countries
acquired them. The Israelis and the Egyptians had more of these
than we did. The Egyptians had stealthy unmanned vehicles.

It was not just a matter of having systems that could deliver
nonnuclear weapons to a target. To benefit fully from miss
distances of a few feet, targets need to be located even more
accurately, and we have to know what small part of a target
is critical for its function. Also, we have to know how direct
immediate damage to the target is related to delayed and indirect
system effects on other military targets and on the civilian systems
we want to avoid harming. Politically useable force needs clear-
cut military aims, and clearer political aims than those of the Gulf
War Coalition. Above all, in a period of revolutionary change, we
need to rethink not only the means but the ends of military force.

Still, we can get one relevant measure of the change over the
last 50 years in our ability to use nonnuclear force precisely if
we compare the F-117A Stealth bomber attacks in 1991 with the
British Bombing Offensive against Germany in 1941. The British
found they had missed their targets so completely that they would
have to abandon precision attacks and resort to huge incendiary
raids against entire cities. The F-117A attacked and hit targets in

616

Baghdad at night that were more heavily defended and at greater
range than the targets in the 1941 Offensive. That comparison
suggests that the cumulative information revolution has had a
greater effect on our ability to destroy a military target that we
aim at than the fission and fusion revolutions combined. It has
shrunk the area of uncertainty as to where a bomb would hit by
a factor of a hundred million. This is four orders of magnitude
more effective than the ten thousand-fold increase in the area
destroyed by nuclear brute force. Nuclear weapons, like the huge
bomber raids that destroyed Dresden by blast and fire, make up
for incompetence in aiming at a target like a missile factory or
a military communications building by filling the huge area of
aiming error with destruction. In the process, they are likely to
destroy a great deal that is not aimed at.

For a democracy, however, the ability to apply military force
selectively — and to hit only what one is aiming at and avoid
hitting anything else — has an even larger political and strategic
importance than an increase merely in destructive power. We can
then preserve what we should want to preserve: Civilians that
do us no harm, irreplaceable cultural monuments, and friendly
forces. If not, another information development— instant satellite
transmission to home TV screens showing the outcomes of
attack — would make it essential in order to maintain allied and
domestic support.

Ill

Not only arms, but arms control have been affected by the
Information Revolution. In the aftermath of Desert Storm, for
example, attempts to find and destroy Iraqi nuclear facilities
have displayed the vacuity of relying exclusively on satellite
photography to monitor agreements limiting weapons of mass
destruction. It offers strong hints of how ground inspection, if
it were supported by the wide dispersal of mobile shirt-pocket-
size transmitters using communication satellites, might improve
matters. Important given the imminent spread of such weapons
and the means to deliver them. David Kay, leader of the UN team,
was surrounded for four days by Republican Guards intent on
keeping him from leaving Iraq with key documents on a nuclear
facility. He simply faxed them to the U.S. by satellite. And he had
only Radio Shack-level equipment.

617

In the future, small, mobile, more advanced computers and
communications equipment spread widely in the population will
play a key role in economic growth. They will also make it safer
for potential whistle-blowers, not only official inspectors. And
they will help frustrate the reversal of popular moves towards
independence.

Western leaders have tried to keep the Soviet Union together,
in part so as to have someone to sign arms agreements with.
Since they failed, they've been trying to make Russia a close
equivalent. But it was the disintegration of the Soviet Empire,
including the Soviet Union— not arms control — that reduced the
arms in the center of Europe and the danger of invasion which
had preoccupied us.

Secretary Baker has said that for Russia to eliminate nuclear
missiles — even those missiles aimed at us — would "undermine the
whole concept of deterrence," which is mysterious. We don't say
that Germany or Japan or Ukraine needs some missiles to deter us.
Some former Soviet republics feel more nervous than Mr. Baker
about Russian missiles as a menace to their independence. They
were ready to transfer their nuclear weapons to Russia, but said
they had no way of being sure that Russia was actually destroying
them. Neither do we. And since the General Staff and the KGB
are alive and well and in charge of these weapons, it's not clear
that Yeltsin has.

We could have said to the non-Russian republics, whose claim
on these weapons is as valid as Russia's, that they had a point.
Since the actual destruction of weapons transferred will in any
case take years (the General Staff is more eager to get the weapons
on their territory than they are to destroy them), we should
have encouraged arrangements for all the non-Russian nuclear
republics to share in monitoring on the ground the dismantling
and storage of weapons. Personal satellite communications in the
hands of those interested in enforcing the agreement could then
assure a timely warning never feasible up to now.

The example has general relevance for future arms control.
With the end of the Cold War, the U.S. has reduced the hair-
trigger alertness of its strategic forces. As former adversaries
indicate their willingness to enter into more open, cooperative
arms arrangements, we can exploit the new technologies to make
sure their forces are in a much lower state of readiness, to get
warning if they increase readiness, and to have available a range
of offsetting readying moves of our own starting from any new
level.

618

These effects of the Information Revolution on arms and
arms agreements reinforce and are reinforced by parallel changes
in worldwide market transactions and growth, and in politics
within and among nations. I've dealt with these last two subjects
and their connection at some length in "The Fax Shall Make You
Free," a talk that I gave in Prague two years ago.

Here I can only make a few summary statements.

The Information Revolution is the most powerful engine
driving innovation and economic growth, creating world
markets, and reducing the costs and uncertainties of innumerable
widely separated, individual, voluntary transactions. These
innovations have been decentralizing. They have dispersed rather
than concentrated the ability to acquire, process and transmit
information.

The new technology fits well the view of economics typified
by Friedrich Hayek, which sees economic activities as adjusting
themselves by responses to signals sent by market clearing prices —
without the need or possibility of a central plan. By improving
the operation of dispersed markets, the new technologies improve
the operation of the system as a whole.

Moving from dictatorship and full socialism to democracy
and free markets was bound to be painful. It's never happened.
Disasters are likely. But moving towards one and not the other
may be even harder. The irrationalities of socialist planning led to
its breakdown even with the most ruthless compulsion to replace
economic incentives. Getting it to work without compulsion
would be less possible.

On the other hand, the tempting notion— suggested by the
experience of Pinochet in Chile — that free markets might be
introduced more easily by dictators than by a simultaneous move
toward democracy is quite doubtful. And Pinochet didn't start
from a full socialist economy.

The dictators want to catch up with the dynamic Western
economies today. And to attract Western investment. They can't
do that without dispersing to their subjects fax machines, modems,
copiers, mobile telephones, and a good deal else. That will make
it extremely difficult to prevent dissidents from talking to each
other and to the outside world — very hard on any dictatorship.

619

China is trying to contain its market experiments in coastal
enclaves. But these enclaves have been the greatest source of
dissent. And, if the experiment is to succeed for China as a whole,
decentralized communications — and their use by dissidents —will
have to spread.

There is nothing, of course, inevitable about these develop-
ments. But it seems a good bet that, as Friedrich Hayek said, the
intrinsic connection between free markets and political freedom
will assert itself. And the new decentralizing technologies
essential to the modem dynamic growth dictators want will help
make it happen.

"May you live in a revolutionary time" is an old Chinese
curse. So it may turn out for the old men of Tiananmen. But not
for the dissidents.

Commentators stunned by the succession of revolutions
in Eastern Europe, by the breakdown of the economies of the
Communist countries, by the upsurge of nationalism in the Soviet
Union, and by the outbreak of war in the Persian Gulf rather
than in the center of Europe — where proper contingencies were
supposed to happen — have tended to prefix all their comments
on these matters by the phrase "Nobody could have predicted
that...." That suggests that they have been no wronger than
anybody else.

Not so. On each of these subjects, a minority of distinguished
scholars persistently differed from the consensus. All such
predictions are wagers. But their bets were based on a better
informed and better reasoned analysis of the forces at work than
the wagers of the majority.

The apocalyptic prophecies are wagers too. Poor bets so far,
but there's no guarantee that we'll avoid all global catastrophes.
The increase in world travel, for instance, raises the risks of a
pandemic. Some deadly virus might mutate more rapidly than
our ability to devise counter-therapies. The species that survives
we may see as a lower order than mankind. This possibility
is plausible enough for us to continue to devote resources to
biogenetic research, to resist opposition to testing therapies on
animals, and to reserve some skepticism about vague proposals
about biodiversity that might cripple such research. Some species
we may want to endanger.

There is a lovely, well-known passage in the Pensees of
Blaise Pascal, the seventeenth century probability theorist and
philosopher. It's about the condition of man— his evident fragility

620

and vulnerability by comparison to some other species — killed by
a vapor, a drop of water. "Man," he wrote, "is only a reed. The
weakest in nature." But, he added, "a thinking reed."

As we leave the apocalyptic age, a homely paraphrase might
run: Man, like all other species in nature, faces daunting odds.
But man is the species that can use information, reasoning, and
insight to improve the odds.

621

VI. LIMITING AND MANAGING NEW RISKS

623

Commentary: Strategy as a Profession
in the Future Security Environment

Andrew W. Marshall

Revised and updated version of Marshall's essay,
"Strategy as a Profession for Future Generations," in
Marshall, J. J. Martin and Henry S. Rowen, eds.. On Not
Confusing Ourselves: Essays on National Security Strategy
in Honor of Albert and Roberta Wohlstetter, Boulder, CO:
Westview Press, 1991, pp. 302-311.

The future is always full of uncertainties. A common error is
to underestimate the scale and multiplicity of the uncertainties.
This is a general failing that Nassim Taleb in his book. The Black
Swan, explores in detail.^ Here we are concerned with the national
security area. In this case, as elsewhere, some aspects of the future
are more predictable than others, and good assessments and
strategies take whatever advantage they can of this. Demographic
trends, relative rates of economic growth are some examples of
relatively more predictable aspects of the future. Also cultural
beliefs in different societies are more stable than other aspects of
the future.

But big changes are also common, indeed major shocks can
occur, and tend to be under-represented in forecasts of the future
not only for the reasons that psychologists tell us about, but in
the national security area because of the pressures of political
correctness. Some topics, some future scenarios, may tend to be
avoided, almost as taboo for a variety of reasons.

We need a strategy, or strategies, that both takes account of our
best assessment of the competition we are involved in, now and in
the future, and in some way takes account of the uncertainties of
the future situation. As I will address below, Albert Wohlstetter
was especially adept in his strategic thinking, particularly on
this score. And Roberta Wohlstetter in her book on Pearl Harbor
stresses the inevitable uncertainty of the future. We will never
know, ahead of time, the future. I have found it useful to think in
terms of the following model: there are the players, all with their
individual goals, resources, distinctive culture, and strategies;
and there is the context, which none of the players controls, for
example, technology, climate, etc. There are long-term trends in
many of these variables, and enduring asymmetries between the

625

players. A good strategy would have to accommodate in some
way all of this, reflect the trends that are changing the situation,
as well as exploit some asymmetry that provides the basis for
advantages he has in achieving his goals. Strategies can involve
coalitions, and obviously they must address adversaries. And, in
some way, they must aim to limit the risks that the uncertainties
pose.

Richard Rumelt in his forthcoming book has an excellent
characterization of strategies as solutions to solve complex
problems. One of the virtues of Rumelt's discussion is that it
provides real clarity about how the word strategy should be
used. In practice, the word strategy tends to be used in too many
ways. In particular I would note that in the national security
area, which is the main focus here, there is a constant tendency to
think of military strategy as related principally to the application
of resources in a possible future war and the general guidance
for more detailed planning for specific contingencies. The result
is that there is relatively little discussion of strategies for the
peacetime management of our military organizations and for the
allocation of resources over time so as to develop more efficient,
effective, competitive military forces with appropriate doctrines
and concepts of operations. Most statements of national security
strategy tend to be just long lists of desirable goals with little to
say about how these goals might be achieved. Good examples of
fully developed national security strategies are thus very few.
There is, then, a special problem in the national security area.

Given the existence of nuclear weapons, the highest priority
objective for the United States has been deterrence of large-
scale war. In this we have been largely successful. Therefore,
the strategic management problem in our national security
establishment was for a long time the peacetime competition to
preserve and indeed enhance in the future our ability to deter
the Soviet Union from actions adverse to our interests. Now this
definition of our priority objective may need serious amendment
as we move into a different world. The discernible aspects of this
world are: the rise of Asia and decline of Europe, a long, extended
struggle with Islamic extremists, wider proliferation of weapons,
including nuclear weapons, and continued rapid scientific and
technological changes.

With new problems, new thinking will be required. It is not
that the uncertainty is higher. There were lots of uncertainties in
the late 1940s and the 1950s, indeed throughout the Cold War.

626

But there are new players, new options, and the natures of the
competitions are different. We will need to be as serious about
strategy as we were in the early stages of the Cold War. Finding
the right people and organizing the right sorts of teams will be
important.

It is clear that some people among us seem more readily able to
address issues of strategy, in particular the strategic management
of our national security efforts. They have a willingness and a
self-confidence to address the larger issues than do others. They
appear to bring a very different perspective to the discussion of
what our strategy ought to be. How do they get this way? What
sort of training is useful? This is what I want to address in the next
two sections.

What Environments Produce Strategists?

This is a question that deserves extensive study. The best I
can do is to draw upon my experience in and observations of
the environment at the RAND Corporation in the 1950s and
early 1960s and my later experience in government in the period
1972 to the present. One disadvantage of focusing on RAND as
a producer of strategists is that it clearly biases the discussion
toward an analysis of the development of people whose role has
been "advising," in the sense that Herb Goldhamer used in his
book. The Adviser} There are other routes to becoming a strategist,
including those who reach high positions in the military services
or enter government service from other career lines such as the
law or investment banking. But the case of RAND is perhaps of
special interest because it did provide in the 1950s and early 1960s
an environment that produced a number of people who are now
acknowledged as major strategic thinkers.

The RAND Experience

There was something special about the RAND environment
from the late 1940s through most of the 1960s. For one thing,
especially in the late 1940s and the 1950s, there was a sense of
being on the leading edge, of dealing with the centrally important
problems. The invention of nuclear weapons and several other
technology developments at the end of World War II produced a
situation that was quite new, one in which the issue of what our
strategy should be was extremely important. Another aspect of

627

this situation, given the large increase in destructive power nuclear
weapons introduced, was that there were no experts. Two small
weapons had been used at the very end of World War II; what
larger numbers of weapons and more powerful weapons might
do to change the nature of war was unclear. Nobel prizewinners
were no better than graduate students in thinking about the
relevant issues, and at meetings and working groups at RAND in
the early days there was no hierarchy. This was an ideal situation
for younger people (the average age of the professional staff at
RAND in 1950 was about twenty-eight), who were immediately
treated as equals and valued for what they could contribute to
the discussions. This is a rare situation, certainly not characteristic
of academia or normal organizations, and it led to the rapid
development of individuals who were willing to address the
broadest issues of national security. There was also a sense of
having a preferred position with respect to access to information
on the new developments taking place in weaponry, in particular
in the design of nuclear weapons, their delivery systems, and
other relevant technology.

Two other things favored the development of strategic think-
ing and innovation at RAND, and the willingness of the people
there to address the highest level national strategy issues. One
was the freedom RAND had to select the problems and the issues
on which it worked. This is very different from the environment
in contract studies organizations, especially now. The other was
the presence of several remarkable men who set the intellectual
tone and style of much of the broader strategies analysis that
began in the early 1950s. Two I would name are Charles Hitch
and John Williams, the heads respectively of the Economics and
the Mathematics Divisions. Apart from their own intellectual
contributions, their cultivation of full-ranging discussion, their
intellectual fairness, and their interest in the development of
younger people and of new methods of analysis all favored the
fullest examination of all issues of U.S. national security.

One of the interesting things that happened at RAND was
the success of the economists in assuming a leading role in the
direction of a number of important studies and, more generally,
in shaping the way in which RAND addressed national security
issues. Initially the economists were brought into what had been
largely a technological organization to deal with what was called
the military worth issue. It had become clear to the technical
people that they needed some assistance in thinking about the

628

objectives that military weapon systems were to achieve. There
was also some interest in the economics of defense, especially
as it dealt with issues of mobilization, and in the targeting of an
opponent's industrial capacity and assessing damage to industrial
societies from strategic bombing. The economists soon played a
much larger and more central role in managing and directing a
number of the successful studies. Why was this?

Herman Kahn and I used to discuss this puzzle. We had a
number of hypotheses. For one thing the economics of the situation,
broadly conceived, were important. What things cost, the level
of resources that nations are able to devote to defense over an
extended period — these all shape one's views as to the kinds of
weapon systems and forces that are desirable and feasible. But
another advantage the economists had was that they knew from
their own experience that experts could be wrong. Indeed, they
also knew that much discussion of economic problems is foolish
and that many widely-held views, even among responsible
people, are faulty. The experience of engineers and physicists is
different. In those fields there are real experts who are much more
likely to be right than are others. Economists, therefore, were
more intellectually comfortable in the situation that existed with
respect to nuclear warfare, in which there were no experts.

One of the people in the economics department who was
the first to lead and manage a large RAND study was Albert
Wohlstetter. Beginning in the early 1950s, he examined a set of
issues connected with the basing of long-range bombers. I want to
note what seems to me one of the major innovations or inventions
Albert made in the conduct of that study. In previous large RAND
studies, the practice had been to lay out a number of alternative
systems or programs at the very beginning of the study. The study
itself focused on evaluating which of the alternative systems was
the most cost-effective.

Albert's approach was different. He started with a few
alternatives to the existing plan or program, but as the study
went on he evolved improved alternatives. He was also less rigid
than had been reflected in the earlier practice in setting down the
criteria, the objective functions, the measures of effectiveness at
the beginning of the study, and then simply sticking with them.
His evolutionary approach developed additional criteria and tests
of performance as more understanding of the problems and the
issues emerged. And a wider range of situations within which the
alternative possible solutions could be tested grew as the study

629

went on. This was, in my judgment, a crucial invention for doing
these kinds of studies, because one would learn much more about
the nature of the issues and the problems, how one ought to look
at them, and what criteria were relevant as one went further along
in the studies. Also, this way of conducting the analysis had the
advantage of inventing additional and better alternative solutions
to examine as one went along. Albert's study was in many ways
emblematic of the kind of good strategic analysis I wrote about at
the beginning of this essay: it accepted certain structural elements
of the situations, and then sought measures to both limit and
mitigate effects of the uncertainty about the future.^

Another aspect of the situation at RAND that was exceptionally
favorable to strategic thinking and innovation during the early
period was the practice of inviting first-rate people to come and
spend the summer. This created an environment in which the
important thing was to try to tap into the very best talent in the
whole country. The objective was not to do the best that RAND
could do with its existing staff, but in a sense to do an analysis that
was the best that the country as a whole could accomplish. By its
very nature, any organization is limited in the amount and variety
of talent, backgrounds, and insights that it can include among
its staff. This attitude of searching for the very best people and
drawing on the best talent is a key to excellence in broad thinking
about any problem or issue. Unfortunately, most organizations
do not operate this way.

Another way in which Albert was especially good was in
reaching outside Rand to get the best technical advice. In the
mid-1950s the experts, at Rand and a DoD advisory group on
physical vulnerability, believed that no structures could be built
to withstand blast overpressures exceeding something like 25
psi. Albert recruited Paul Weidlinger, an innovative structural
engineer, to design hardened structures for protecting aircraft and
missiles to withstand overpressures far beyond this limit. Herman
Kahn was also involved because of his knowledge of the physics
of nuclear weapons effects. This led, after a long argument and
tests, to a major shift in views of what was possible.

The RAND of the 1950s and early 1960s was a remarkable
place, both for the talent it recruited and for its atmosphere and
intellectual dynamic. It was also remarkable for its boldness in
addressing broader questions of strategy. It is, therefore, not
surprising that some interesting and influential people developed
there.

630

The U.S. Government

The next experience that is perhaps relevant comes from my
time in government. Beginning in the middle 1970s, I was involved
in attempts to initiate strategic planning activities in the Depart-
ment of Defense including some strategic planning experiments.
In particular, James Roche, then a U.S. Navy Commander, and I
wrote several papers during 1975-1976 to promote strategic think-
ing in the Defense Department. We also sponsored contractor
research on some aspects of strategic planning. This experience
led me to believe that, while systems analysis had been a liberating
force during its early development, by the middle 1970s it had
become a constraint on thinking strategically. People who were
systems analysts found it difficult to address the sorts of questions
that we felt needed to be considered in strategic planning. People
with a business background or a combination of business school
and military service seemed to be among the best at taking up and
addressing the questions we wanted dealt with.

We saw it as a vaccination problem: some backgrounds
promoted strategic thinking and others seemed to inoculate
people against it. Why is that? To some extent, the systems analysts
had by that time developed routine approaches to analysis and
perhaps had ceased paying sufficient attention to the complex
consequences of acquiring the systems they dealt with. James
Schlesinger commented to me a number of years ago that systems
analysis proceeds by trivializing the measurement of effectiveness
while perfecting the analysis and estimate of costs. Programmatic
actions, the acquisition of particular weapon systems, the adoption
of a new concept of operations, and the setting of new objectives
for military forces have complex consequences, including their
effects upon the beliefs, actions, and resource allocation patterns
of potential opponents. Most of these consequences are not
usually considered in the standard kinds of analysis. One result
is that the top leaders of the Department of Defense often get
remarkably little assistance from their staffs when truly strategic
decisions are addressed. This is because the focus of the work of
the staffs, the criteria they use, and their measures of effectiveness
are too narrow to account for the considerations that top-level
decisionmakers in fact want to consider, are concerned with, and
take into account as best they can.

631

Some decisions have larger and different consequences
than others. For example, a decision to pursue or create a major
strategic defense capability is different from a choice among
several alternative programs for the next generation of fighter
aircraft. The former involves going into a new business for the
U.S. military (although it is a business we once were in), the latter
the continuation of an existing business. Different issues are
involved, different forms of analysis seem needed, but existing
analysis methods tend to treat the two types of decisions the
same way. Part of the problem may be that much if not all of
the existing analysis methodology was developed to assist in
procurement or operational planning decisions. Other methods
of analysis are necessary when the questions are more like: What
businesses should I be in? What are my competitive advantages?
One advantage people from the business world or business
schools may have is that they are used to addressing these kinds
of questions, though often with analysis methods that are less
systematic.

What Backgrounds and Experiences Are Conducive to Strategic
Thinking?

There is no specific set of disciplines that must be mastered to
be a strategist. People who think strategically come from a number
of different backgrounds. Among those whom I have met, and
feel that I know personally, the best academic backgrounds seem
to be economics, business school, applied technology (especially
for those who have been in the business world), and in some cases
political science. But what seems to be central is a cast of mind
that is questioning, eclectic, able to address the broadest kinds
of issues and goals, and able to formulate appropriate ways of
achieving these goals. A high tolerance for the uncertainty that
necessarily accompanies any effort to think forward five, ten, or
twenty years is required. For many people, some period of intense
involvement in an important, large-scale project or enterprise has
proved to be crucial.

World War II was such an experience for a number of people
and, indeed, there may be a generational factor at work: living
in interesting times may contribute to being a good strategist.
People who were involved — even if only in staff positions or on
the peripheries — in some major decisionmaking body connected
with that war had a special quality about them. Experiences in

632

World War II clearly had a significant impact on a number of
the people who were at RAND during the 1950s. Because they
contained many people with World War II experience the Truman
and Eisenhower administrations had a character to them that
favored strategic thinking. This characteristic of administrations
has gradually eroded since the late 1950s.

The changes that we now see in the security environment of
the United States are forcing another major effort of rethinking
our situation, our goals, and our strategies. It might, therefore,
be a period in which a new generation of strategic thinkers will
emerge as a result of the critical experiences they will go through
in the next decade.

Turning to the question of what kind of academic study or
professional training might be useful, I would start with economics
and business school training, especially business schools that
have strong programs in business policy and strategy. My
recommendation about economics is, however, a guarded one.
Since the 1940s and 1950s, economics training has become too
mathematical, too focused on the acquisition of particular analytic
tools that are not, in fact, of much use in the national security
area. Something like the first courses in graduate school may be
enough. They are important, however, because people who do not
have a sense of macroeconomics and the fundamental tradeoffs
that societies have to make, find it difficult to think clearly about
the long-term implications of devoting large, possibly excessive,
percentages of gross national product (GNP) to military uses.

In the early 1980s, when the first initiatives were taken
within the Defense Department to encourage application of a set
of ideas that later were labeled as competitive strategies, I had
a discussion with the chief of one of the military services. His
reaction to the idea of designing some military programs so as to
impose increased costs upon the Soviets was negative, or at least
cautious. He had two arguments against focusing on increasing
Soviet costs or expenditures.

The first was that the Soviets would simply spend the extra
money, there being no reasons for them not to do so; the second
was that our own budgets fluctuate so much that it was unwise
to stimulate a competition which we ourselves might not sustain.
The second of these arguments has real merit to it. The first shows
an unawareness of the long-term consequences for the Soviets
of high levels of military expenditures or of possible tradeoffs
between individual programs the Soviets might be compelled to
make, since resources always are limited.

633

Another virtue of economics training, or for that matter
business school training, is that a modest amount of mathematics
is acquired, as is some sense of the importance of technology
and an ability to interact more effectively with technologists and
hard scientists. This was one of the advantages the economists
had over the political scientists at RAND in the early 1950s:
quantitative analysis was something the economists were used
to, and their interest in or ability to discuss and understand what
the technologists were up to was somewhat better than that of the
political scientists.

Demography is another area that deserves much more
attention than it has had in the past in the development of strategy.
The relationship of demography to political and military behavior
is likely to be an area of increased importance and attention.
Demography is often brought into discussions of strategy and
broad national policy, but only in the most obvious and limited
ways. William McNeill a few years ago wrote a small volume
addressing some of the broader relationships of demography to
political behavior.* As in other of his works, he provides a number
of hypotheses and sketches out areas that deserve considerably
more attention.

Additional fields of interest are cultural anthropology,
ethnology, and some areas of psychology. In some ways a
new understanding of man is emerging, based on study of the
evolution of man and human society and on new analyses of the
biology of man, in particular the functioning of the brain. How
men process information, make decisions, and behave are central
issues on which much new knowledge exists and more will be
available in the future.

But above all, if I had a suggestion to make, it would be
that people study, in any case at least read, history of all kinds:
military history, of course, but also economic and technological
history. The history or analysis of past wars is a major antidote
to the narrow focus of many existing methods of analysis of
defense issues. Most discussion of strategy and defense programs
is, if anything, too focused on technology and weaponry and not
enough on the other factors that often dominate actual warfare.
Also, if one considers the extended competition between states
such as Rome and Carthage, the issue of why the Romans won in
the end may shed interesting light on the key variables that need
to be considered in our conceptions of strategy.

634

Another factor of great importance is to understand the
differences in the ways in which other nations are likely to
perceive situations and react to them. Specialized studies of the
strategic cultures of Russia, China, India, Japan, Iran, and the
European nations and many others are of great use. Some of this
can be gained by reading the history of these nations, especially
the development of their military and other national security
organizations. Other aspects relate to the particular cultural
characteristics of these societies.

The Future of Strategy

We are at a major turning point in history. Uncertainty
about what the future competitive environment will be like is
especially pronounced. There are at least three major issues that
our defense or national security strategy must deal with. There
is the problem of radical Islam, which both poses an immediate
threat and has the potential to be a long-running problem. Any
serious strategy dealing with this problem will have to have a
substantial nonmilitary component. A second issue is the potential
emergence of a strong hostile China. A major problem of strategy
here is setting and articulating in some definitive way the goals
for the U.S., or a picture of what, ideally, we would like to see Asia
as a region look like in 20 or 30 years. The third major strategic
issue, I believe, is the likely proliferation of WMD (particularly
nuclear weapons) and long-range strike systems. We can of
course try to prevent proliferation, but any realistic strategy must
take account of the possibility that these efforts will fail and that
the future world will have many more nuclear powers, some of
whom would employ weapons in ways very different from how
we have tended to focus on.

Of course, a defense or national security strategy for the long
term must deal with all of these problems. It must attempt to shape
the future security environment where possible, and develop
hedges against the emergence of particular threats or problems.
There is also pronounced uncertainty about the character of future
warfare: new kinds of weapons systems are being developed,
which in turn will require the development of new doctrines, new
concepts of operations, and new kinds of military organizations
to exploit fully the new technologies. What our strategy should
be for the more complex competition that is emerging will
require consideration of many aspects of the changing security

635

environment and changing technology. We will need to know
much more than we now do about the emerging regional powers,
as well as about the likely major actors, their strategic orientation,
their strengths, and their weaknesses.

It is hoped that new centers of strategic thought and innova-
tion will arise and a new generation of strategists and military
innovators will develop to deal with these problems.

ENDNOTES - Marshall

1. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the
Highly Improbable, New York: Random House, 2007.

2. Herbert Goldhamer, The Advisers, New York, NY: Elsevier,
1978.

3. "TheoryandOpposed-Systems Design" (1968), Wohlstetter's
essay on the theory and design of competitive systems in an earlier
part of the present volume, reflects this approach.

4. William H. McNeill, Population and Politics Since 1750,
Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1990.

636

End of the Cold War? End of History and All War?
Excerpt from an Outline for a Memoir (1989)

Albert Wohlstetter

Excerpted from Albert and Roberta Wohlstetter, Proposal
to the Ford Foundation, June 30, 1989, revised July 10, 1989,
pp. 15-17, private papers of Joan Wohlstetter. Courtesy
of the Wohlstetter Estate.

The democracies appear to need imminent threats in order to
induce them to prepare for latent long-term dangers. However,
Protecting U.S. Power to Strike Back in the 1950s and 1960s (R-
290), "The Delicate Balance [of Terror]," "The Objectives of U.S.
Military Power" [RM-2373], "No Highway to High Purpose" and
other [of my] writings on the second-strike theory of deterrence
took pains to make clear that they were directed not at the
immediate likelihood of a Soviet nuclear attack— due to Sputnik
or a supposed "missile gap" or a "window of vulnerability" or the
like. None of these writings held that the Soviets were straining at
the leash to launch a nuclear attack and that an adequate second-
strike capability was the only thing that held them back.

Even though R-290 had shown that Strategic Air Command
(SAC) was very vulnerable in the mid-1950s, it said that its
authors did not believe that an attack was imminent: that would
depend on the Soviet alternatives to such an attack and the
comparative risks. Unanticipated obstacles in the course of a
Soviet conventional invasion in Eurasia, for example, might make
the risks of a disastrous defeat so large that we would want the
risks to the Soviets in a nuclear attack to be even larger.

In the mid 1950s, it was disturbing that the risks of such an
attack to the Soviets were smaller than was generally understood.
But rumors about SAC that appeared in the press at the time of
the Gaither report were considerably less modulated. Even so
matter-of-fact a reporter as Stewart Alsop said, "The American
government has recently been presented with just about the
grimmest warning in its history." And other reporters suggested
that they were talking of a present danger of imminent attack.

"The Delicate Balance" and "No Highway to High Purpose,"
in contrast, talked about "a new image of ourselves in a world of
persistent danger" and that the problem was more "like staying
thin after 30." The serious danger, in any case, was never that of an

637

unrestrained Soviet version of a massive SIOP [Single Integrated
Operational Plan] — the RISOP [Red Integrated Strategic Offen-
sive/Operational Plan] — which preoccupies military planners.

Today the danger of a sudden massive all-out nuclear attack
by the Soviet Union, or of a global conventional war focused on
a Soviet invasion of the center of Europe which would quickly
become an all-out nuclear war — never very large — has been
receding even further. Moreover, the ideals of liberal democracy
and free markets nearly everywhere seem to be gaining at the
expense of the Utopian dreams of communism.

Does this mean there are no latent long-term dangers
demanding prudence? Georgy Arbatov has suggested that we are
deprived now of any adversary and need to focus only on problems
of the environment and of economic development. We would all
welcome that. However, the political and economic futures of the
heavily armed communist states and of the increasingly lethally
armed Third World countries are, to say the least, rather cloudy.

Even if, implausibly, the Second and Third Worlds change
rapidly to the market economies of the First World, nice though
this would be, we are likely to discover once again that, contrary
to Cobden and the Manchester School, trade and investment —
good things though they are — are not all that pacifying. Trading
partners have found a good many reasons to go to war.

We haven't seen the end of fanaticism, mortal national and
racial rivalries, and expansionist ambitions. It is conceivable that
all the variously sized lions and lambs will lie down together, that
there will be the kind of universal moral revolution that many
hoped for at the end of World War II when they thought it, in
any case, the only alternative to nuclear destruction. But, as Jacob
Viner wrote at the time, "It is a long, long time between moral
revolutions." We should not count on it. . . .

638

The Fax Shall Make You Free (1990)

Albert Wohlstetter

A previously unpublished speech delivered to The Peace-
ful Road to Democracy, a meeting of the leaders of the in-
dependent democratic movements from the republics
of the Soviet Union and the countries of East/ Central
Europe, Prague, Czechoslovakia, July 1990.

"Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free."
Dissidents in communist empires have given this ancient promise
a new secular meaning. "Living in truth," to use Vaclav Havel's
phrase, has been hazardous in societies whose Ministries of Truth
spread variations of Big Brother's slogans — Freedom is Slavery.
War is Peace. Ignorance is Strength. But the dissidents have
used the explosive growth in western information technology
to end the isolation which had made resistance seem hopeless.
Information technology has moved in a direction opposite to that
feared by Orwell in his mercilessly honest dystopia, 1984. It has
surprised even the bureaucracies of the information giants like
IBM and AT&T, with their past emphasis on massive imperson-
ally shared mainframe computers and centralized, hierarchical
communications networks.

Personalcomputers. Laptops. Modems. Fax machines. Copiers.
Satellites. Flexible "packet" networks enabling individuals to skip
the bottleneck of central control to talk with each other. These
have dispersed rather than concentrated information. They've
been decentralizing. In the West, they are now the most powerful
engine driving innovation and economic growth, creating world
markets and reducing the costs and uncertainties of innumerable
widely separated voluntary transactions. In the East, the same
technologies have helped dissidents escape Big Brother's
clutches. Even the Anarchist Party in the Soviet Union uses word
processors. The Center for Democracy in the U.S.S.R., as one of
its early acts, sent laptops and modems to put dissidents in touch
with each other and with the world outside. Its conveners have
good reason to use this conference for distributing copiers and fax
machines to the leaders of the movements towards independence
and democracy.

It is the dissidents who have spread the unsparing truth at great
-peril. They've made increasingly visible the contrast between free.

639

individual, political and economic choice and prosperity in the
West, and the political and economic disasters of state ownership
and central planning, and the resulting brittleness of communist
power. Western media and Western leaders aren't nearly as clear
as they might be that it's the dissidents who deserve our principal
thanks. Not the communist leaders who tolerated the telling of
the truth only when they could not suppress it, and when they
glimpsed the catastrophe involved in continuing on the course
they had been following.

European and American leaders have helped. But, to understate
the matter, they've been rather less brave than the dissidents.
Western pressure at Helsinki in 1975 was critical for opening
channels of communication. Even more, the democracies, by
spreading information through such agencies as Radio Free
Europe (RFE), Radio Liberty and the BBC, have played an essential
role in the process of opening the closed socialist societies and
ending the isolation of their subjects. RFE has been a forum for
dissidents talking to each other. Mr. Havel has said it was RFE
that made Charter 77 and his own name known to Czechs and
Slovaks. For the hard journey from communism to free indi-
vidual political and economic choice, RFE and Radio Liberty
should continue to provide a vital forum. To see how important
this can be, one need only look at China today, whose dissidents
have had to make themselves heard and known without nearly as
much help from Western governments. "Tell the Truth" was their
most elementary demand in Tiananmen Square. The Chinese old
guard can't survive that truth. So far its spread has had to rely
on satellite images sent by CNN and the ingenuity of students
talking with each other through modems and fax machines in
Cambridge, Palo Alto, Hong Kong, and Beijing. The truth that
surfaced in Tiananmen Square hasn't — yet — had its ultimate
effect in China. But it helped end the isolation and fortify hope
in Central and Eastern Europe. Tiananmen Square was reflected
a few months later in the satellite images of Czech students in
Wenceslas Square who wore headbands with Chinese characters
about their Goddess of Liberty.

Gorbachev deserves some credit. However, he is not the Man
of the Decade; still less, as Robert McNamara suggests with
characteristic excess, Man of the Half-Century. Solzhenitsyn,
Sakharov, Bukovsky, Hayrikyan, Djilas, Walesa, Havel, Fang Li
Zhi, and many others are much more plausible candidates for
that title. Gorbachev sensed that the Soviet Empire was coming

640

apart, and, more than his communist predecessors, he should get
credit for letting some of his subjects tell the truth more freely.
But the Western media and many Western leaders have gone
overboard about him. They sometimes seem only a little less
vaguely enthusiastic than the coed who greeted him at Stanford
University, gushing "Gorby, Gorby, he's a real stud." Even the
Iron Lady seems to have succumbed to the smile of the man
Gromyko described as having Iron Teeth. Vaclav Havel notes that
Mrs. Thatcher was "enchanted with the charm of Mr. Gorbachev"
and that the entire civilized world is "fascinated by the fact that
Mr. G. drinks whiskey and plays golf —thanks to which mankind
is not utterly bereft of all hope of survival."

We can't thank Gorby for telling the truth unsparingly himself.
He doesn't. On Lithuania, he squirts ink like a cuttlefish, leaving
Congressmen, who asked recently whether he could throw a little
light on the matter of Baltic independence, swimming in nearly
total darkness. In September 1989, after more than five years of
Glasnost, Gorbachev was still saying with a straight face that the
U.S.S.R. had swallowed Lithuania in 1940 legitimately. (After the
Red Army's tanks rolled in to help explain things, Stalin's experts
on democratic voting counted 99.19% of voters as favoring a
government that asked to be swallowed up.)

A reasonable man, Gorbachev has said that all he wants is
to negotiate, not to coerce. (While Red Amy tanks and armored
personnel carriers rumble through the streets of Vilnius in the
middle of the night.) All he asks is that the Lithuanians — and the
Estonians, and the Latvians, and the Azeris, and the Ukrainians,
et al. —recognize the Rule of Law that binds everyone in the Soviet
Union including himself. But he uses the word "law" like Humpty
Dumpty in Through the Looking Glass, who took the view that when
he used a word it meant exactly what he chose it to mean, no more,
no less. "The question," Humpty Dumpty explained to Alice, "is,
who is to be master, that's all." Gorbachev rushed through new
laws defining rules for secession and vastly increasing emergency
presidential power to replace governments opting for secession.
After the Lithuanians had declared their independence. These
laws set so many traps that they can make independence under
Soviet law unreachable.

The United States, the Council of Europe, and many independ-
ent bodies have held that the Soviet occupation of the Baltic
Republics in 1940 created no legal basis for Soviet rights against the
countries invaded. Oddly enough, in December 1989, Gorbachev

641

and his advisor, Alexander Yakovlev, in official statements,
agreed. Three months after and three months before saying the
opposite. Late news has him swinging again. Stay tuned.

Gorbachev's oscillations on Lithuania and other nationalities suggest
that he is divided. He may mean it when he says, as he has several
times, that he wants to see the Soviet Union make a transition
to a loose federation like that of the British Commonwealth. The
purpose of the Commonwealth has been "to give expression to a
continuing sense of affinity and to foster cooperation with states
presently or formerly owing allegiance to the British Crown."
It has included several dozen sovereign nations, each with its
own foreign and economic policies, some of which — like India
and Pakistan — have gone to war with each other. It has been
described as the least structured of any of the major international
organizations. Its secretariat wasn't established until some thirty-
five years after its inception.

It's conceivable that Gorbachev intends his federation, like the
Commonwealth, merely to serve as a framework for a peaceful
process of nearly total decolonization. However, he continues
also to say the opposite — that he has no intention of allowing the
republics to separate. He has stirred up old ethnic antagonisms
between Georgian Christians and Muslim Meshketians, Armen-
ians and Azeris, Uzbeks and Khirgizians, and he has tried to
mobilize Great Russian minorities against majorities in Lithuania,
Latvia and Estonia. Gorbachev's Ministry of Truth is working
on the theory that Ignorance is Strength. Though voters in a
democratic election endorsed Sajudis overwhelmingly and the
party that supported Gorbachev got only four out of 141 seats in
the Lithuanian Supreme Soviet, he has denounced the Sajudis as
coup d'etatists, sneaks and adventurers. He's tried to divide and to
continue to rule nationalities that want to be free. He has not had
much success in mobilizing Great Russians. Present leaders of the
Russian Federal Republic would like independence themselves
and are much more friendly to the idea of independence for the
other republics.

Captive nations in the Soviet empire are not likely to bet
the farm on Gorbachev's desire for peaceful decolonization.
Neither should Western governments. They should encourage
him in that desire in the way the U.S. encouraged its closest ally.
Great Britain. For peaceful movements towards independence
in the Soviet Republics — more than anything else, including
arms agreements — can redraw the political map of all Eurasia.

642

The moves towards democracy in the center of Europe reduced
the threat to Western interests there. The moves in the Soviet
Republics can reduce the threats to Western interests not only in
the center of Europe but also in the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean
area.

Gorbachev's economic gyrations have been just as extreme. His
party job, before he assumed the chairmanship over five years
ago, gave him a glimpse of the grim economic disorder shrouded
by the statistics of the central planners. But his actions since
have swung from an attempt to strengthen and accelerate the
central plan by moral exhortation — a kind of Stakhanovism
without the compensations Stakhanov drew from vodka — to
announcements of moves towards decentralized markets that
show little understanding of what makes markets work. Each of his
improvisations has aimed at incompatible ends: Market-clearing
prices that change to balance supply and demand vs. prices fixed
or regulated by planners: Securing the benefits of venture capital
while maintaining the state's monopoly of most productive assets
and of the right to employ the human capital needed to operate
them. His defense of socialism doesn't differ much from that of his
archrival, Ligachev, who recently called for "planned markets."
Gorbachev's programs ignore the results of several decades of
experiments with Reform or Market Socialism.

The idea of a Market Socialism, which Gorbachev clings to
even while his advisors increasingly tell him to forget it, has in-
spired attempts to reform for over thirty years. On the results of
these many experiments, Janos Kornai — a splendid economist
who, as a young staff member at the Hungarian Academy of
Sciences in the summer of 1956, made his first proposal for
reforming Hungarian socialism — tells the unsparing truth. Under
the Market Socialism which guided the reform process in Hungary
and several other socialist countries, he says, the idea was that
state-owned firms should remain in state ownership, but

should be made to act as if they were part of a market
... I wish to use strong words here, without any adorn-
ment: the basic idea of market socialism simply fizzled
out. Yugoslavia, Hungary, China, the Soviet Union, and
Poland bear witness to its fiasco. The time has come to
look this fact in the face and abandon the principle of
market socialism. . . .

643

Moving from the disasters of state ownership and central
planning to free markets and institutions of individual ownership
that encourage risk taking and growth is a hard job. It will
take decisive, mutually reinforcing actions on several closely
connected matters: among other things on monetary and fiscal
reform, making currencies convertible for foreign trade, freeing
prices and wages while assuring a safety net — a floor to income
but no ceiling. Above all, it will call for shifts from state-owned
enterprises to private ownership and institutions which define
property rights coupling rewards and responsibilities. That
is much harder than confiscating property and moving from
capitalism to bureaucratic central control. The joke that socialism
is the hardest path from capitalism to capitalism is a bitter truth.

A reformed robber is not one species of robber. Reform Socialism,
unluckily, is a form of socialism. A reformed robber, having given
up a life of crime, isn't a robber at all. But Reform Socialism —
"Market Socialism" — haplessly tries to save socialist state
ownership rather than to face the need to abandon it. Kornai and
many other economists who lived through these experiments
have a lot to say, not only to Gorbachev, but to the many Western
economists who have mismeasured and overestimated socialist
performance and so have led to Western leaders being astonished
by events. They could have something to say also about some
dramatic economic policies in the West, which have been less
ruinous than those in the East, only because the choices have been
narrower and their defects have not been writ as large.

In the 1920s and 30s "Market Socialists," including the Polish
Keynesian Oskar Lange and the President of the American Economic
Association, Fred Taylor, debated the Austrian free market economists
Hayek and Mises. The market socialists held that managers of
state-owned enterprises and their superiors who managed whole
industries, and their superiors, the bureaucrats in the Central
Planning Bureaus, could act as if they were capitalists. They would
choose prices, inputs and outputs so as to maximize expected
profits without actually getting the rewards or suffering the risk
of failure and personal losses that, for private entrepreneurs,
vary greatly with skill and luck. They would receive only the
theoretically chaste rewards of socialist bureaucrats. But such
socialist imitation markets don't provide the essential motivation
to managers or to labor to act efficiently and innovatively. They
provide very large incentives for lying about the numbers — not
least about the sensitive numbers relevant to the actual distribution

644

of rewards under socialism. And they don't provide the context for
the natural selection — out of a multiplicity of chancy competing
inventions and innovations — of those surviving inventions and
innovations that drive economic evolution. Central planning in
a complex economy requires an enormous amount of accurate
information in the hands of the planners about the uncertain
supply and demand at various prices of millions of dispersed
individual commodities and services. Not even the most massive
number-crunching supercomputers of the future can solve the
problems of central planning. Hayek, Mises, and others under-
stood its infeasibility. It's no wonder that Western measurements
of Soviet economic performance have been so far off the mark. The
numbers aren't there to be crunched. And the critical problem,
neglected by Taylor and Lange, of command economies has to do
with motivation, rewards, and personal responsibilities.

The critical deficiency of socialist state property, Janos Kornai
observes, consists in "the impersonalization of ownership: state
property belongs to everyone and to no one." Vaclav Havel says
that in a command economy "the company allegedly belongs to
everyone, but in reality it belongs to no one." This common sense
observation goes back in time long before Hayek to Aristotle's
critique of Plato's egalitarian Utopia where all property was to
be owned in common. Aristotle noted as one of many drawbacks
to common ownership that "the greater the number of owners,
the less respect for the property. People are more careful of their
own possessions." The Russian economist, Vassily Selyunin,
observes that "because the state's property belongs to everyone
and therefore to no one, it is considered perfectly normal to
make off with the company dump truck to take the family to the
countryside." Many other economists in the Soviet Union and
Eastern Europe use other examples, but almost the same words.
Oddly enough, Gorbachev has used almost the same words about
state property belonging to no one but thinks that's just an attitude
that needs changing, not the institution.

A remarkable number of able Western economists have agreed
that the Hayek-Mises arguments had "no force," and that Lange
had won the debate about a command economy's ability to work
very well. And that the actual Socialist economies were catching
up with the West and might even, as Khrushchev said, bury us.
From 1963 to 1973 the Soviet Union and China were generally
supposed to be growing much faster than the 22 advanced
economies of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and

645

Development. China, during this period that included the chaos
of the Cultural Revolution, was supposed to be growing at 10%
a year. A World Bank study in 1979 estimated the annual rate of
growth in Romania at nearly 10% for the 25 year period ending
in 1975. The 1989 Handbook of Economic Statistics, published by the
CIA, shows East Germany's per capita income as 87.5% of West
Germany's in 1988. The estimate for 1985 in the 1990 Statistical
Abstract of the United States shows it as slightly more than that
of West Germany's. One wonders why traffic between the two
Germany's has moved West rather than East. As recently as 1988,
a Brookings study expressed the establishment view that "Soviet
leaders have good reason to be proud of Soviet economic growth"
and claimed that Soviet income distribution is "far more equal
than... in the U.S." Why in the world do Soviet citizens or their
leaders want any sort of economic restructuring?

As for the real ability of the Politburos to make command
economies work or to meld dissident nationalities into one happy
homogeneous Socialist Man, Western establishments — except
for a few steady clear-eyed men — seem to have been looking the
other way.

Realpolitikers in the West tend tohave a very tenuous grasp on reality.
Those that place their bets today on a Socialist dictator's ability to
suppress the movements for democracy and independence aren't
realists. Not really. They're quixotic. Cynical dreamers. Fifteen
years ago, the State Department Counselor advised the Poles
to give up their romantic notions about independence and face
reality. Sooner or later, they were going to be part of the Soviet
Union, and it was better not to wait before seeking a more "organ-
ic" relationship with it. That was shortly before Lech Walesa and
Solidarity exploded on the scene.

Today it should be obvious. Realpolitikers selling friends
or principles are not likely to get hard currency in exchange.
Gorbachev is short on both political and economic hard cash.
Advocates of large Western loans to save "perestroika" or
Gorbachev would be well advised to face up to the reality that
Gorbachev has given "perestroika" no coherent sense. Nor has
he faced up to the reality that socialism can be abandoned but
not reformed. Except of course in the sense of "the Reformed
Robber."

The information revolution raises credibility problems also for
western governments. It affects their attempts to shroud warnings
to dictators in a decent ambiguity just as it offers instant, visible

646

refutations of the dictators' descriptions of events. The images of
Soviet leaders vowing that they would not use force in Lithuania
and of NATO leaders pretending that they believed them and
cautioning them to continue not to use force shared television
screens with images of invaded hospitals in Vilnius with blood
on the walls. Western political leaders and Western media talked
as if the actual Soviet use of coercion and bloody use of force
were only a possibility while it was actually happening. And
they continue to talk as if the actual were only hypothetical long
after the Soviet government has admitted that it had used force to
suppress peaceful demonstrations — as it did in the case of their
use of airborne troops and poison gas in Tbilisi, Georgia. When
supposed political realists in the West talk of the actual past and
present as if they were merely possible, they exorcise reality.
They are not realists. They do not inspire confidence about their
ability to discern the forces at work that will bound future options
realistically. And they encourage Communist leaders not to take
warnings seriously, to continue on precisely the course they have
publicly urged Communist leaders not to follow.

A Socialist ruler wanting both dynamic economic growth and to
hold colonies captive faces a dilemma today. The ongoing revolution
in microelectronics and in optics has brought us high-speed,
high density sensors, and data processing and communications,
increased the number of features of a chip by a factor of 100 every
ten years so that, in the 1989 state of the art, chips the size of a
child's little fingernail contained over a million gates and per-
formed many tens of millions of instructions per second, and have
reduced the cost per operation a million-fold in the last thirty
years. This revolution has had patent importance for world trade
and economic growth. It also has had consequences for political
change. And the two are not separable.

It's plain that Gorbachev's economic crisis worsens his
nationalities problem, and vice versa. Aside from this obvious
unfavorable interaction, the two problems are related, but not in
the way visually assumed. Neither these colonies nor the huge
size of the Soviet Union are needed to achieve a rapidly growing
per capita GDP. Rapid growers like Taiwan, not to say Singapore
and Hong Kong, are smaller than the nine million square mile
extent of the Soviet Union, and have many fewer than 280 million
people. The star economic performance of the small islands of
Japan shows that the natural resources of various republics aren't
essential either. The key to rapid economic growth has to do with

647

human capital and the institutions of ownership that encourage
people to take large personal risks for big prizes, to compete and
to innovate in world markets. An attempt by Russia to hold on to
a colony by force imposes an economic burden on both. It insures
an instability that discourages foreign investment.

Perhaps most important, isolating and suppressing dissidents
are incompatible with using the decentralizing information tech-
nologies whichpower domestic economic growth. And which pros-
pective foreign investors now insist on if they are to do business
in the Soviet Union. A vivid example of this key dilemma is the
recent failure of Gorbachev to persuade American businessmen
during his stop in San Francisco that the Soviet economy offers
investment opportunities as good as those available elsewhere.
John Sculley, Chairman of Apple Computers, Inc., told reporters.

Without telephones and fax machines, we can't do busi-
ness . . . Right now there are a lot safer investments that
all of us could make. Many of the people who had been
thinking last fall of investing in the Soviet Union are now
looking to Hungary, Poland, and Czechoslovakia.

In short, if Communist leaders want domestic economic growth
and expanded foreign investment, they will have to accept a vast
expansion and spread to millions and even tens of millions of
individuals of the decentralizing technologies that put dissidents
in touch with each other and the outside world and make it
impossible for Big Brother to keep them from learning and telling
the truth. Gorbachev wants fax machines, personal computers,
modems and the lot. Prospective foreign investors will insist
upon it.

But the fax can make you free.

648

The Bitter End: The Case for Re-Intervention in Iraq (1991)

Albert Wohlstetter and Fred S. Hoffman

From The New Republic, Vol. 204, No. 17, April 29, 1991,
pp. 20-24. Courtesy of the Wohlstetter Estate and Fred S.
Hoffman.

The United States and other members of the coalition, having
intervened so massively in Iraq, have an obvious moral obligation
to see to it that ethnic and religious minorities and the Shiite
majority there have some protection against the deadly revenge
of the Baath government. State Department and White House
spokesmen, in a hopeless attempt to cover the obvious, have been
emitting a dense fog of statements justifying first the vacillation
and then the reversal of policy on using force to prevent the
Republican Guards from training their helicopter gunships,
artillery, and other heavy equipment on innocent Iraqis.

They continue to blur easily documented truths: that the
president and the U.N. announced aims beyond the retaking of
Kuwait, that the U.N. specifically authorized the use of force to
implement all of its resolutions on Iraq, and that near the very
outset of the war, the president plainly said the fighting wouldn't
end when we got Saddam out of Kuwait — it would go on until
Iraq's cooperation on all of the resolutions was assured. Members
of the administration seem unaware that the disastrous direction
in policy since the rout of the Iraqi army greatly reduces any
chance that we can bring about substantial improvements in
the protection of our interests and those of our partners in the
region.

A key illusion held by the administration is that the war now
being waged in Iraq is an "internal affair" that does not affect our
interests or the interests of stability in the region. Yet the chronic
disorder and factions in the Near East and Persian Gulf have their
roots precisely in the internal violence of regimes there: their use
of terror to suppress advocates of conciliation and all reports of
violations in the letter or spirit of agreements, the absence of any
internal check on the ambition of leaders, and the widespread use
of schoolchildren and women as targets and shields. It is naive
to suppose that the many arms control arrangements, border
adjustments, and sanctions we have in mind can be sustained and
would operate effectively without substantial changes in many
"internal affairs."

649

Last week's U.N. Resolution 687 on the cease-fire in the Gulf,
to take one example, "decides" that "Iraq shall unconditionally
undertake not to use, develop, construct or acquire ... all chemical
and biological weapons and all stocks of agents; and all related
subsystems and components and all research, development,
support, and manufacturing facilities" useful for acquiring
components and subsystems of such weapons. For this even to
appear to be a serious undertaking would require a permanent
and continuous intervention in the internal affairs of an Iraqi
government far more extensive than a one-time U.N. supervision
of an election arranged by a provisional government. Enforcing
such an undertaking by a totalitarian dictatorship is essentially
infeasible. Arms control in this area, if feasible, can only occur
in a society in which the government can't stop individuals from
telling the outside world what's happening.

U.N. Resolution 688, to take another example, condemns Iraq's
handling of the rebels and was approved 10-3 by the Security
Council including the U.S. representative. It should finally put
to rest the U.S. claim that we can't stop the mass killings in Iraq
because they are an "internal affair." U.N. 688, over Iraq's protest,
states that the mass killings are not an internal matter: they
threaten "international peace and security."

The president had remarkably thoughtful aides but deserves
the principal credit for the skill with which Desert Storm was
prepared and pursued. He deserves this not least for explicitly
recognizing, in the course of the muddled debate that followed
the invasion, what most of his critics never seemed to grasp:
that we had more than one reason and more than one aim in
responding forcefully, and that these reasons were mutually
reinforcing. It seems incredible that he should now forget what
he achieved in leading the U.N. Security Council to authorize the
use of force — "all necessary means"— for aims beyond getting
Iraq out of Kuwait; and that he should now let the dogma that
encouraged Iraq's invasions of Iran and Kuwait — that we need an
Iraqi dictator to balance Iran and Syria — cloud everything that he
accomplished and wants to achieve.

The president himself intended Desert Storm to serve some
longer-term and broader aims beyond the operation's immediate
goal — embodied in U.N. Resolution 660 — of getting Iraq out
of Kuwait. Six days before the U.N.'s January 15 deadline for
Saddam to accept all its resolutions, the president said, "I am
more determined than ever that the United Nations' resolutions.

650

including 678, be implemented fully." U.N. 678 authorized
continuing force after Iraq left Kuwait, i.e., "to use all necessary
means to uphold and implement Security Council resolution
660 (1990) and all subsequent relevant resolutions and to restore
international peace and security in the area" (our italics).

Thirty-seven hours into Operation Desert Storm and the
liberation of Kuwait, the president said the liberation of Kuwait
"would not end the fighting." We would then seek compliance
with all the U.N. resolutions. The fighting "isn't going to end
short of the total fulfillment of our objectives." General Norman
Schwarzkopf, in his now famous strategy briefing during the last
hours of the operation, said:

. . . There's a lot more purpose of this war than just get the
Iraqis out of Kuwait [sic]. The purpose of this war was to
enforce the resolutions of the United Nations. There are
some twelve different resolutions of the United Nations,
not all of which have been accepted by Iraq to date. . . .

Moreover, at the outset of Desert Storm, the general reflected
the president's view that we would make some sacrifice in
overcoming Iraq's powerful military machine because we wanted
to "minimize any harm done to innocent civilians." While the
president was saying that at a news conference in Washington, the
general was saying the same thing in his briefing in Riyadh: "We
are doing absolutely everything we possibly can in this campaign
to avoid injuring or hurting or destroying innocent people."

The president's decision was right, but also prudent. The
myth that we must destroy a country in order to save it paralyzes
policy. In Desert Storm, we concentrated, with imperfect but
widespread success, on highly accurate, discriminating weapons
against military targets, exploiting a cumulative revolution in
information technology. Saddam's arsenal, in contrast, was
primarily rooted in weapons of mass destruction. We wanted to
destroy the Iraqi army as an organized force. Saddam wanted us
to destroy Iraqi innocents. He used them as shields at strategic
installations because he believed our destroying innocents would
cost us essential domestic and coalition support. Killing Iraqi
innocents doesn't bother him. He's been doing it himself for
years. For us to kill them would blur a defining difference, which
we should never lose sight of, between us and him, and his likes.

651

The revolution in technology made it feasible in Desert Storm
to be discriminate. A strong focus on isolating and destroying
Saddam's army in and near Kuwait fit well with reducing
our killing of Iraqi civilians. With Desert Storm over, we can
still discriminate. Using air power selectively now to stop the
Republican Guards from killing Iraqi civilians fits very well with
our longer-term aim for a stable balance of power in the region.

The president said he wanted to "leave it to the Iraqi military
and the Iraqi people" to take care of Saddam. He failed to make
the distinction between the Republican Guards (which acts as
praetorian guard for Saddam and his Baath thugs) and the regular
army (at which the Guard pointed its guns to enforce the army's
role as cannon fodder). Yet it is the rebels in the regular army
joining forces with the Iraqi resistance who might help bring
about some necessary political change in Iraq.

Only a very murky, fantasy realpolitik suggests that the
brutal Baath dictatorship, and only it or its murderous Republican
Guards, can keep Iraq together as a peaceful "balance" to the power
of fundamentalist Iran or Syria. No regional balance will be stable
without the West's involvement. Any Baath regime would be not
only a potential aggressor but also a continuing major opponent
of any Western intervention on behalf of the weaker powers. The
same vague delusionary realpolitik about a Baath Iraq seems to
be the source of the embarrassing indecisiveness of the last two
weeks. The president's instincts to stop the slaughter by Baath
thugs would better serve his desire for a stable peace in the area.

In any case, we can't avoid intervening. The president already
broadcast worldwide his invitation to the Iraqi dissidents: "[T]he
Iraqi military and the Iraqi people [should] take matters into their
own hands to force Saddam Hussein the dictator to step aside."
We were intervening massively in Iraq's "internal affairs" when
we destroyed much of an Iraqi army, whose main function since
Iraq gained independence in 1932 has been the repression of Iraqi
civilians. And we intervened massively in Iraq's internal affairs
when we targeted so large a proportion of our air sorties against
Iraqi industry.

The intent of coalition leaders was to avoid killing civilians,
and, on the whole, they conducted the campaign with unprece-
dented care. Some normally quite accurate weapons inevitably
went astray. Some targets were mislocated. The choice by the stra-
tegic intelligence and target selection bureaucracy of some indus-
trial targets such as electric power, which affects sewage and

652

water distribution for Iraqi civilians, was questionable. And the
repeated strategic bombing of second-and third-order industrial
targets in Iraqi cities, in contrast to the use of air power to isolate
and destroy Iraqi ground divisions in the Kuwaiti theater of
operations, disrupted essential human services as well as political
control. If we want medical aid and food restored for civilians,
and if we want those civilians to survive assaults and eventually
achieve some measure of self-rule and freedom from a tyranny
that has been lethal to the outside world as well as to Iraqis, they'll
need some help. We'll have to force the Baath government to
refrain from its normal practice of slaughtering civilians.

At the end of February, if we had continued the fighting to
achieve all our objectives as the president had said we would
on January 18, it would not have taken much force. Not with
the Iraqi air defense network destroyed. It would have meant
continuing for only a few days the rapid destruction of artillery,
tanks, and warplanes, continuing a rout that many called an
unfairly riskless and inhumane "turkey shoot." They called it
that before they understood that these "turkeys" were deadly and
intended to slaughter defenseless civilians. Those who now blame
the United States for deaths of Republican Guards, civilians the
Guards murder, and civilians we tried not to kill are themselves
indiscriminate. If the coalition continues fighting, it could have
clear-cut aims to complete the rapid rout of a defeated regular
military force. Very different from guerrillas under dense jungle
canopies. Or a Lebanese terrorist driving a truck loaded with
explosives against a U.S. Embassy standing as a permanent target.
The Vietnam and Lebanon "quagmires" that those who opposed
Desert Storm conjured up near its start, to assure us, by analogy,
that Desert Storm would take years and pile up tens of thousands
of casualties, turned out to exist mainly in their heads. The
analogies should look even more irrelevant after Desert Storm.
Desert Storm went more rapidly than even the coalition expected,
in part because they underestimated the latent resentment and
rebelliousness of the ordinary Iraqi soldier and his readiness to
surrender, defect, or turn on his Baath and Republican Guard
tormentors.

In the administration's search for another military or Baath
party dictator it continues to overestimate the amount of force
required to even the odds for the resistance. Even now it will not
take a great deal of force. Nothing like restarting a ground war.
Nor anything like the full-scale air campaign. The coalition has

653

been flying combat air patrols unopposed over north and south
Iraq. AWACS surveillance aircraft can detect and identify any
Iraqi fighters or helicopter gunships in violation of the truce and
can guide patrolling aircraft to intercept them. With tanker aircraft
over Iraq to refuel tactical reconnaissance as well as combat
planes, we can spot and use precision weapons to destroy on
the ground Iraqi warplanes and artillery used in violation of the
truce. We can airdrop communications equipment that enables
the resistance to coordinate their actions and to stay in touch with
the outside world. And we can surely deliver medical supplies,
food, and other humanitarian aid directly to civilians in territory
held by the resistance and to resistance fighters whom the Baath
government is starving out.

The last is the most obviously urgent and also the most risky
of the above measures. It involves exposing big, vulnerable air
cargo planes and their crews flying low and slow over the delivery
areas to the large numbers of shoulder-fired missiles and machine
guns in the hands of infantry. Yet in a belated reversal of policy,
the U.S. government announced that it will fly C-130 cargo planes
from Turkish air bases to make air drops of humanitarian aid to
the Kurdish resistance. We have warned the Iraqi government
not to interfere, and the Pentagon has declared that we will fly
combat air patrols with jet fighters as cover for the C-130s. There
is a substantial chance that some of the very large number of Iraqi
infantrymen who have hand-held and shoulder-fired weapons
will use them to bring down a cargo plane and its crew. This
amounts to a reversal by the president of his statement that he
will not risk the precious life of even one American soldier in the
current civil war.

But if we can undertake this risky mission to bring aid to those
who have been subjected to mass killing and maiming, why can't
we undertake less risky missions in order to reduce drastically the
gunships, the artillery, and the like that are doing the maiming?
The U.N. coalition has more than enough means to even or reverse
the present odds. But serious signals of our intentions have to be
clearly made through the clouded media of the press and TV.
Signals of our intent have been far too mixed ever to make clear
that we really did want Saddam to stop slaughtering Iraqi citizens
and to let them pick their leaders. The signals have baffled the
press. And maybe Saddam. Saddam simply ignored warnings not
to use helicopter gunships. If Iraqi Kurds, Shiites, and ordinary
soldiers misunderstood our intention when we said "the Iraqi

654

military and the Iraqi people should take matters into their own
hands," it would be absurd now to make the issue trivial, like
deconstructivist literary explication de texte. We have an obligation
to make such momentous signals clear.

If we are unwilling now to use a minimal amount of force out
of the vast air power that still gives us air supremacy in Iraq, how
likely are we to use force in the future when we will have neither
the power in place, nor as heartrending a cause, nor as urgent
an obligation, nor as unified a coalition and domestic support?
In the days after victory, public support for continuing the fight
to oust Saddam was high. As the genocide grew, Arab members
of the coalition — for example, Kuwait and Egypt— were urging
"all necessary means" to stop the annihilation by the Republican
Guards. While we held back, France and Turkey took the lead
in pressing for U.N. condemnation of the Iraqi government's
war on the Iraqi people. And British Prime Minister John Major,
urged by Mrs. Thatcher, preceded us in announcing plans to send
humanitarian aid directly to the resistance. The U.S. government,
which led the way into Desert Storm, cannot plausibly attribute
its delayed response to its coalition partners.

On the whole, it might be better for government spokesmen
to replace the embarrassing noise they have substituted for
explanation with total silence. But better still, the administration
should think through the implications of our current actions for
the longer run in the Gulf and in the Near East. And cast a cold eye
on the uncritical assumption underlying its indecision: the view
of our diplomats, persisting since the fall of the Shah, that an Iraqi
dictatorship would be a lesser evil and the only real alternative to
fundamentalist fanatics or the "Lebanonization" of Iraq.

Lebanon is not a convincing analogy. Much of the factional
strife there is the heritage of French attempts to preserve the
dominance of the Maronites, as demographic trends increased the
numbers of Muslims, especially poor Shiite Muslims, and as the
Palestinians, excluded from political participation by almost all
Arab states as well as by Israel, multiplied in camps like Shatila.
What serious parallel is there in Lebanon to Iraq, where a few
members of the Sunni Arab minority, making up perhaps one-
fifth of the population, preside over a Shiite majority that is mainly
in the south, where it competes very little with the Kurds in the
northern province of Mosul who form a minority about as large as
that of the Sunni Arabs? The Shiites in the south and the Kurds in
the north oppose their Baath oppressors. The Kurdish opposition

655

has indicated that it is seeking greater cultural autonomy in a
federal structure in Iraq. President Ozal of Turkey has accepted
the idea of cultural autonomy in a federal Iraq and is increasing
the cultural autonomy of Kurds in Turkey. The Shiite Arabs in
the south during the Iraq-Iran war did not respond to Khomeini's
appeal to join forces with the Iranian Shiites any more than Arabs
in [Iran's] Khuzistan answered Saddam's call to join Shiite Arabs
in southern Iraq.

Why is it against the interests of the West for Iraqis to vote
on such a loose federal structure? What magic does our own
Arabist establishment see in an Iraq unified and dominated by
a dictatorship of a few members of the Sunni Arab minority? Yet
in many background briefings anonymous officials have been
telling reporters that "all-out military efforts to assist anti-Hussein
forces may not serve our long-term interests." They may "make
Iran dominant in the Gulf." We need the present dictatorship for
the balance of power. Of course, Saddam himself is a bit hard to
swallow. So the talk is of a Republican Guard general or a Baath
Party without Saddam. It's doubtful that we know how to arrange
that. Trying to do so would be not only meddling in the internal
affairs of Iraq, but micromanaging the selection of personnel in
the party or the army.

This bipartisan view of the importance of a Baath Iraq for
regional stability has long held sway. In April 1980 Zbigniew
Brzezinski, President Carter's national security adviser, on PBS's
"MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour," responded to many broad Iraqi
hints that they could take care of our Iranian problem, and sent two
nominally separate but deliberately and ominously juxtaposed
messages: "We see no fundamental incompatibility of interests
between the U.S. and Iraq," and "I make two separate propositions:
one that we do not wish to continue the anomalous state of U.S.-
Iraqi relations, though . . . the road towards improvement is a
long one. Secondly, the Iranians themselves ought to consider
the potential consequences for Iran of Iran's continued isolation."
Four months later, Baath Iraq invaded Iran. That did not bring
about a stable balance of power.

When the Iraq-Iran war ended in 1988, many Western
Arabists, including our own diplomats and some key figures
in the Reagan and Bush State Departments, held that Baath
Iraq, weakened by that war, had shifted permanently toward
moderation, cooperation with neighbors like Kuwait, the building
of its civilian economy, and avoidance of foreign adventures. It's

656

no wonder they were surprised in August 1990. Their continuing
preference in the current civil war for the Baath party over the
present opposition may be preparing future shocks.

There is no reason to believe that preserving the Baath
dictatorship or a military substitute is the only way or the best
way or any way at all to keep Iraq whole. And there is plenty of
reason to believe that if the Baath government does survive and is
in charge of Iraq and its oil revenues, Baath Iraq will not remain
weak. It will use its oil reserves to revive its strength and its
menace to the neighborhood. Supporting a Baath tyranny strong
enough to avoid "Lebanonization" but too weak to threaten the
stability of the region would be like trying to walk a tightrope in
a hurricane — in the wrong direction.

Even if we don't help the resistance, the Baath government
might lose control in one place or another. Then the chance of
dismemberment by the outside parties who have supported
various opposition groups while we stood idly by is greater. But if
we take a forthright stance against outside parties dismembering
Iraq and in favor of letting the Iraqis vote on their own future,
including their own future leaders, the threat of Lebanonization
is likely to be quite small.

Neither the United States nor the U.N. has made a change
of government in Iraq an explicit "formal war aim." Secretary
Baker is right about that. However, both the United States and the
U.N. have made formal demands on Iraq that cannot be fulfilled
unless there is an Iraqi government whose agreement to comply
is credible. If the formal demands are serious, they entail such
a change. The president understands that. Time and again he's
made clear that he can't conceive of negotiating in the future with
the present Iraqi government. He's said that Saddam's "credibility
is zero, zilch, zed."

"Leaving it to the Iraqis" does not mean staying neutral in
the uneven military struggle between a Baath tyranny armed
with jet fighters, helicopter gunships, tanks, and artillery and
the spontaneous, poorly equipped, diverse but widespread
opposition. Nor does it mean that the only alternative to staying
neutral or siding with the Baath dictators is for us to pick the
leaders who will rule Iraq — as the British, after World War I,
picked Faisal, after his expulsion by the French from Syria, to rule
in Iraq. It should mean letting Iraqi citizens have a chance to pick
their leaders. No one should expect a Jeffersonian democracy to
emerge full-blown from the present chaos, like Aphrodite from

657

the sea. But even a government selected by a random process
would be better than Baath rule.

Political elites in the West, especially those who opposed the
U.N. coalition's use of force against Saddam, have talked much
about the need for immediate elections in Kuwait. They seem more
eager to intervene in the internal affairs of the least repressive
country in the Gulf— the victim of a catastrophic invasion — than
in Iraq, its perpetrator. It's more urgent to improve the political
process in Iraq— to give Iraqi citizens access to information and
some opportunity for making informed political choices. Is it likely
that Arabs and Muslims, of all peoples in the world, are unable to
judge their own self-interest and move toward self-rule? Turkey
shows that, contrary to the received wisdom of many Western
Arabists, Islam is not incompatible with democratic rule. The
disaster visited on Iraqi subjects by the Baath dictatorship, and
the avowal of democracy by the resistance groups, are the right
occasion for testing the myth about the incapacity of "the Arab
street" to make informed choices.

It was essential that the Desert Storm campaign have a clear-
cut political and territorial objective that could be accomplished
rapidly and decisively. Nonetheless, we have always had other
goals, and if we are to bring about useful long-run change toward
a moderately stable order in the Gulf and in the Near East, we
have to be ready to use discriminate force, and to use some force
now, in the service of other clear-cut limited aims. We can slow
somewhat the pace with which we bring our airmen home without
stopping it; or we could send in some replacements. In any case,
no matter how fast our planned withdrawal, the onset of disease
and famine produced by the devastation of Iraq's infrastructure
and by the prolonged internal fighting is taking place before the
eyes of our forces in the region. We and the coalition will still
have a massive amount of force in the area, a selection of which
can be used for clear, limited ends that are political as well as
humanitarian.

What the U.N. coalition needs most is a little clarity about
its essential aims beyond U.N. 660's demand on Iraq to get out
of Kuwait. Many are embodied in the dozen or so U.N. Security
Council resolutions that directed the coalition and empowered
it. They include holding the present Iraqi government to
account for the enormous harm it has done to other nations. The
public accounting of the harm done can be as important as the
compensation. And the latest U.N. resolution, U.N. 688, calls for
a detailed report to the Council of the harm done by the Iraqi

658

government to its own people. Just airing the atrocities against
innocents, whom the Baath government has used both as targets
and shields for its military power, will be clarifying generally in
the Middle East, where, for example, a member of the coalition,
Syria, and all factions of the PLO have used innocents as both
targets and shields. That has been a chronic, continuing source of
regional instability. But holding the present Baath dictatorship to
account for the harm it has done against innocents is incompatible
with trying to preserve it or standing by while it suppresses all
opposition.

Paramount among the conditions for getting Iraq to fulfill the
demands made in these resolutions is ensuring that individuals in
Iraq can freely communicate with each other and with the outside
world. Such freedom of information is essential not only for Iraqis
to choose leaders whose promises will be credible, but also for
the viability of any arms agreements to control manufacturing
activities that can quickly be converted to the manufacture of
weapons of mass destruction. It is an essential — and not yet
adequately understood — prerequisite for the improved order the
president seeks in the region.

If we are clear enough about our purposes, we can use
military force discriminately in ways that will avoid both chaos
and the restoration of Baath totalitarian control. The United States
and other members of the U.N. coalition should announce their
support for U.N. -supervised democratic elections in a unified
Iraq after a period in which the U.N. member nations have made
available to Iraqi citizens an accounting of the atrocities of the
Baath regime. The allies should also clearly state that they oppose
the Baath government's use of helicopter gunships, jet fighters,
artillery, rockets, and tanks to suppress opposition, and regard the
use of such force as a violation of the current truce; and that they
will use air power selectively to compel the present government
to live up to the conditions of the truce and to stop the slaughter
of innocents.

Members of the coalition should use photo reconnaissance
and surveillance by other sensors and other means to verify,
document, and publicize any aspects of the war the Iraqi
government is waging against its people, such as the reported use
of chemicals. And the coalition should air-drop communications
equipment to the Iraqi resistance to aid in this process and to help
them coordinate their actions.

659

The allies should also consider inserting some special forces
to aid in their use of air power by bringing equipment useful in
identifying and locating Republican Guard units and their heavy
equipment, and in calling in and directing any use by the coalition
of precision weapons against such units, and to help organize and
direct the resistance to the Baath government's reimposing its
control. In any such use of special forces, Arab members of the
coalition should play a most prominent role.

While the present battle goes on between the resistance
forces and the Baath government, and as the United States brings
soldiers home, the coalition should not hurry to withdraw all its
forces from the substantial part of southern Iraq that it currently
occupies, nor formally conclude the occupation. Air power based
nearby and air patrols over Iraq— "Eyes in the Sky" and the air
power to pursue infractions of U.N. demands selectively — are the
last things we ought to take out.

It would be a terrible irony if our historic military success
were to end in an equally historic political and human disaster.

660

What the West Must Do in Bosnia:
An Open Letter to President Clinton (1993)

Albert Wohlstetter and Margaret Thatcher

From Wall Street journal, opinion section, September 2,
1993, p. A12.

In Bosnia, the situation goes from bad to worse. The people
there are in despair about their future. They are victims of brutal
aggression. But they are also the victims of the failure of the
democracies to act.

Instead of opposing the acquisition of territory by force, the
United Nations and the democracies have dispatched humanitarian
assistance to Bosnia. But welcome as it is, this will not stop the
massacres or halt the ethnic cleansing. Humanitarian aid will not
protect the besieged children of Bosnia from being herded into
Muslim ghettos or orphaned or maimed or slaughtered.

These could have been our children.

If we do not act, immediately and decisively, history will record
that in the last decade of this century the democracies failed to
heed its most unforgiving lesson: that unopposed aggression will
be enlarged and repeated, that a failure of will by the democracies
will strengthen and encourage those who gain territory and rule
by force.

1. Humanitarian Aid and Future Ethnic Cleansing.

In Bosnia the democracies have used the need to deliver
humanitarian aid both to excuse their own inaction and to keep the
recognized multiethnic state of Bosnia outgunned and therefore
itself unable to protect its civilian centers from slaughter by a
dictator bent on making a Greater Serbia. Western governments
now vying publicly to save several hundred maimed Bosnian
children will not escape the responsibility they assumed for the
slaughter of hundreds of thousands of other children and their
parents, when they refused to let an independent Bosnia defend
itself.

Recently, the U.N. and EC [European Community] mediators,
with U.S. support, threatened to withdraw humanitarian aid in
order to coerce the Bosnian government into accepting violent
changes in its borders and a partition into ethnically pure states,
with Bosnia a set of widely dispersed, unarmed Muslim ghettos.

661

But the U.N., the EC and the U.S. have continually condemned
such changes and that partition as totally unacceptable. Such a
partition, they've said, is unstable: It will mean still more killing,
broken families, and the expulsion of millions at a time when
Europe is closing its doors to refugees. If the fall of Sarajevo is a
preface to a partition creating unarmed Muslim ghettos, it will be a
preface also to further disasters, ethnic cleansing and instability —
in Sarajevo itself and other Bosnian "safe havens" protected only
by the U.N., in the rest of the Balkans, and beyond.

Bosnia, unlike Somalia, was no civil war. Like Kuwait,
it was a case of clear-cut aggression against a member of the
U.N. — a member whose independence the U.S., Europe and the
international community have recognized for at least 16 months.

When the Baath dictatorship seized all of Kuwait in August
1990, it tried to erase Kuwaiti identity using rape, torture, the
seizure of Kuwaiti passports and the forging of a new identity of
Kuwait as a province of Iraq. A coalition of several NATO powers
and some non-NATO countries joined the U.S. in demanding and
then, in January 1991, compelling Iraq's withdrawal by using first
air power throughout Iraq and then ground forces in Kuwait and
southern Iraq. The coalition was exercising the right of individual
and collective self-defense of each of its members and of Kuwait.
It aimed at more than mitigating Kuwait's suffering. The U.N.
endorsed the coalition's aim to get Iraq out of Kuwait, and the aims
beyond Kuwait to reduce Iraq's power to terrorize its neighbors.
But the U.N. exercised no authority over the coalition.

In the same way, the U.S. should now lead a coalition of
Western governments that exercises the right of each to individual
and collective self-defense. The U.N. Charter does not confer
that right; it acknowledges it to be "inherent." Nor is that right
conditioned on the secretary-general's approval.

The West's air-to-air fighters overflying Bosnia needed no
further preparations to shoot down the command helicopters and
helicopter gunships that the Serbs, in yet another blatant violation
of their promises, used to drive the Bosnian army from their
defenses of Sarajevo on Mounts Igman and Bjelasnica. The West
could have done this without elaborate plans to coordinate air
strikes against ground targets without endangering U.N. forces on
the ground, and without the permission of the secretary-general,
Europe's Council of Ministers, the 16 NATO ambassadors and a
variety of U.N. commanders — procedures that appear designed
to make the fall of Sarajevo a fait accompli. A disaster not only for

662

the Bosnians, but for the relevance of the U.N., Europe, NATO —
and the U.S.

Western governments should act now substantially to reduce
Serbia's immediate and future power of aggression and ultimately
to put the Bosnians in a position where they won't have to rely
indefinitely on the protection of the international community.

With this limited political aim. Western air power would play
a much larger role, and U.S. and other Western ground forces
a much smaller and more transient role, than in U.N. -directed
options that look toward an indefinite future of protecting on the
ground helpless Muslim ghettos and besieged corridors of supply
to them. The ghettos and the corridors to them would be subject
to continuing artillery, armor and sniper attacks so long as the
source of these attacks in Serbia is left intact.

Air power directed against the present and future potential
sources of such attack can be used selectively and discriminately.
The no-fly zone could be enforced and defenses suppressed
over Serbia as well as Bosnia. And a very high percentage of the
military aircraft on the large airfields in Serbia could be destroyed,
with minimal danger to Serbian civilians or to UNPROFOR (U.N.
Protective Force) troops.

The U.N. alternatives mean a future of ethnic cleansing and
endless military protection by the international community.

2. Bosnia Is Not History.

What the West says and does now in Bosnia will affect the
future in Bosnia itself; in the rest of the Balkans; and in other
newly independent countries that, having gained their freedom
when a communist dictatorship fell apart, now find that freedom
threatened by former rulers who would, like Milosevic, use the
pretext of protecting minorities to retake strategic facilities and
territory that their pan-national military has never been reconciled
to giving up.

Even now, after 16 months of a perverse Western policy
piously condemning the pan-Serbian aggressors while doing
nothing to stop the massacres, the West can use military force
substantially and discriminately to reduce the power of the
poorly motivated and ill-disciplined Serbian Army in Bosnia and
its source of support in Serbia itself. And the West can help arm
the larger, highly motivated Bosnian Army that still maintains
a precarious control of the towns containing most of Bosnia's
industry, including its weapons industry. In this way the West can

663

improve the odds for the survival of a free multiethnic Bosnia.

On the other hand, if Western mediators and UNPROFOR
confine unarmed Bosnian Muslims to small, purified remnants
of Bosnia, the public will watch with horror as these ghettos
disappear before its eyes on television while Serbs violate this
ceasefire — as they have all the others for 23 months in Croatia and
Bosnia. A spectacular display, at the same time, of the unshakably
naive faith in Serbian promises that underlies Western cynicism.
Realpolitik revealed as fantasy in real time.

Even if, like Kuwait in August 1990, all Bosnia (and not just
Sarajevo) were seized, it would be essential for the democracies to
make clear, as they did in the case of Kuwait, that violent border
changes and ethnic cleansing will not stand, whether by Serbia in
Croatia and Bosnia, or by Croatia in Bosnia.

If the West does not make that clear, it will have nothing
persuasive to say to the Croats and the Serbs who have already
renewed the conflict Serbia started two years ago when it used the
Yugoslavian Army to seize territory in Croatia and then turned to
invading Bosnia. Nor will the West be able to stop Serbian ethnic
cleansing of Albanians in Kosovo and of Hungarians in Vojvodina.
In Macedonia (unrecognized by either the U.S. or Europe because
the Greeks object), where the U.S. and Sweden have deployed
ground forces with no clear purpose. Western policy seems even
murkier than for the other former Yugoslavian republics. There
the West will have nothing coherent to say to resolve potential
conflicts among Greeks, Serbs, Albanians, Bulgarians, Turks, and
frustrated Macedonian nationalists who may topple the moderate
Grigorov. Finally, the West will have nothing to say to discourage
the now serious threat presented by pan-nationalists in the former
Soviet Union and elsewhere.

3. The Role of Force and of Empty Threats.

Empty threats have a perverse effect.

Against a dictator who will yield only to superior force the
West can threaten most ferociously in the hope that threats alone
will be enough to stop aggression— that its threats and endless
preparations will "send a message." But if the West doesn't use
force at all or if it uses it symbolically rather than substantially
to reduce Milosevic's power, or if it uses force to coerce Bosnian
capitulation, "the message" received will only bring American
and Western resolve into contempt.

664

Signatories:

Margaret Thatcher, Former Prime Minister of the U.K.

George Shultz, Former Secretary of State

Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan, Former U.N. High Commissioner

for Refugees
Frank Carlucci, Former Secretary of Defense
Francois Heisbourg, Former Senior Adviser to President

Mitterrand
Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, Former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N.
Zbigniew Brzezinski, Former National Security Adviser to the

President
William Clark, Former National Security Adviser to the

President
Paul H. Nitze, Former Chief Adviser on Arms Control
Max Kampelman, Former Head of the U.S. Negotiating Team on

Nuclear and Space Talks with the Soviet Union
Walther Leisler Kiep, Chairman, Atlantik Bruecke (Bonn)
Natan Sharansky, Former Soviet prisoner of conscience
George Soros, Creator of the Open Society Fund, supporting

opposition in Belgrade
Murat Karayallin, Mayor of Ankara
Elie Wiesel, Nobel Laureate
Czeslaw Milosz, Nobel Laureate
Joseph Brodsky, Nobel Laureate
Susan Sontag, Writer
Sir Karl Popper, Philosopher
Albert Wohlstetter, Winner, Presidential Medal of Freedom

Morton I. Abramowitz, Pres., Carnegie Endowment for

International Peace
Fouad Ajami, Johns Hopkins University
Mark Almond, Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford University
Muhyi Al-Khateeb, Member of Iraqi National Congress

(London)
Abdulrahman Al-Rashed, Editor in Chief, Al Majalla (London)
Ivo Banac, Professor of Modern History, Yale University
Daniel Bell, Professor Emeritus, Harvard University
Ishik K. Camoglu, Political Commentator, Turkish Times

665

David S. Clark, Professor, University of Tulsa Law School

John Cogan, Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution

Devon Cross, Pres., Donner Canadian Foundation

Ihsan Dogramac, Chairman of the Board of Trustees, Bilkent

University (Ankara)
Robert H. Donaldson, President, University of Tulsa
Alfred Dregger, Hon. Chairman of the CDU/CSU, German

Bundestag
Osama El Baz, Senior Political Adviser to the President of Egypt
Sukru Elekdag, Former Turkish Ambassador to Washington
Charles W. Fairbanks, Jr., School of Advanced International

Studies, Johns Hopkins University
Alan Fogelquist, Historian of the Modern Balkans
Rend Rahim Francke, Director, Iraq Foundation
Gerald Frost, Director, Centre for Policy Studies (London)
Frank J. Gaffney, Jr., Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of

Defense, International Security Policy
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., W.E.B. DuBois Professor of African

American Studies, Harvard University
Patrick Glynn, Resident Scholar, American Enterprise Institute
Zuhair Hamadi, Director, Organization for Human Rights in

Iraq
Marshal Freeman Harris, Former head of Bosnia desk at the State

Dept.
Pierre Hassner, Director, Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches

Internationales (Paris)
Donald Hicks, Former Undersecretary of Defense for Research

and Engineering, Department of Defense
Fred S. Hoffman, Former Director of Strategic and Theater

Forces, Department of Defense
Efraim Inbar, Director, Besa Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-

Ilan University (Israel)
Werner Kaltefleiter, Professor Political Science, Christian-

Albrechts University, Kiel (Germany)
David Kay, Former Head of the IAEA Inspection Team in Iraq
Zalmay Khalilzad, Former Director of Policy Planning, Defense

Dept.
Altemur Kilic, Former Turkish Deputy Ambassador to the U. N.
Teddy Kollek, Mayor of Jerusalem
Mirko Kovac, Serbian novelist
Salko Krijestorac, Correspondent for Ljiljan, "Free Bosnia"

magazine

666

Laith Kubba, Member, Iraqi Natl. Congress (London)

Beate Lindemann, Executive Vice Chairman, Atlantik-Bruecke

(Bonn)
Gerhard Lowenthal, Journalist, ZDF-TV, Germany
J.J. Martin, Senior Counselor, Presidential Commission on

Integrated Long-Term Strategy
Stjepan G. Mestrovic, Professor of Sociology, Texas A&M

University
Joshua Muravchik, Resident Scholar, American Enterprise

Institute
Uwe Nerlich, Director of Research, Stiftung Wissenschaft und

Politik (Germany)
Emma Nicholson, M.P., Chairman of Iraqi Humanitarian Relief

Committee
John O'Sullivan, Editor, National Review

Martin Peretz, Editor-in-Chief and Chairman, The New Republic
Richard N. Perle, Former Assistant Secretary of Defense for

International Security Policy
Boris Petrovchich, Chairman, American Committee to Support

Democratic Croatia
Norman Podhoretz, Editor, Commentary

Srdja Popovic, Founder of Vrema, opposition weekly in Belgrade
Reha Poroy, Vice Chairman, the Social and Political Studies

Foundation, Ankara
Igor Primorac, Professor, Hebrew University, Jerusalem
Nasser Rabbat, Assistant Professor, M.I.T.
Paul A. Rahe, University of Tulsa Law School
Ghassan N. Rassan, Scientist, American Geophysical Union
Andras Riedlmayer, Harvard University
Peter W. Rodman, Senior Editor, National Review
Eugene V. Rostow, Former Director, U.S. Arms Control and

Disarmament Agency
Nicholas Rostow, Former Special Assistant to the President for

National Security Affairs
Henry S. Rowen, Former Assistant Secretary of Defense for

International Security Affairs
Stefan Schwarz, Member, German Bundestag
Christian Schwarz-Schilling, Member, German Bundestag
Namik K. Senturk, Former Governor of Istanbul
Ismail Seysal, Former Ambassador of Turkey
Albert Shanker, President, American Federation of Teachers
Henry Siegman, Executive Director, American Jewish Congress

667

Robert H. Silk, Coalition for Intervention Against Genocide
Michael H. Spreng, Chief Editor, Bild am Sonntag (Hamburg)
Hans Sterken, Chairman of Foreign Affairs Committee, German

Bundestag
Norman Stone, Professor of Modern History, Oxford University
Andrew Sullivan, Editor, The New Republic
Seyfi Tashan, Director of Foreign Policy Institute, Hacettepe

University (Ankara)
Bassam Tibi, Professor of International Relations, University of

Gottingen
Abdurrachman Wachid, Head of Nahdutal Ulama, Indonesia
Helga Walter, National Strategy Information Center
Max M. Warburg, Partner, M.M. Warburg & Co. (Hamburg)
Leon Wieseltier, Literary Editor, The New Republic
Roberta Wohlstetter, Winner, Presidential Medal of Freedom
Otto Wolff von Amerongen, Chairman, German East- West Trade

Committee (Cologne)
Paul Wolfowitz, Former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy
Aydin Yalcin, Editor, New Forum (Ankara)
Memduh Yasa, Chairman, the Political and Social Studies

Foundation (Istanbul)
Mesut Yilmaz, Leader, Motherland Party (Turkey)
Rex J. Zedalis, University of Tulsa Law School

668

Boris Yeltsin as Abraham Lincoln? (1995)

Albert Wohlstetter

A draft essay posthumously published in Stjepan G.
Mestrovic, ed.. The Conceit of Innocence: Losing the
Conscience of the West in the War against Bosnia, College
Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 1997, pp. 200-
207. Courtesy of the Wohlstetter Estate.

Andrei Kozyrev, Russia's foreign minister, has been defending
the bombing of Chechen civilians to suppress the independence
that the Chechens declared in 1991. He compares Yeltsin's war to
Lincoln's Civil War against the secessionist South. And Michael
McCurry, then about to debut as the new White House spokesman,
offered some smooth support for Yeltsin's and Kozyrev's "new
democracy ... in the former Soviet Union," saying "in our long
history as a democracy . . . we dealt with a secessionist movement
in an armed conflict called the Civil War." He added later that
while "we don't like innocent civilians losing their lives . . .
Chechnya is by international recognition part of Russia."

So was Yeltsin's Russia by international recognition part of
Gorbachev's Soviet Union in 1991, when Soviet soldiers killed
innocent civilians in Vilnius seeking independence for Lithuania,
shot at citizens in Baku to head off independence for Azerbaijan,
and fired into a peaceful demonstration in Tbilisi to stop Georgian
independence. Yeltsin in 1991 was president of the Russian
republic and was /or Russia seceding. He denounced the use of the
Soviet army against Soviet citizens in the Baltics as a violation
of the Soviet constitution— just as now civilian leaders of the
movement toward democracy in Russia and some of Russia's
highest-ranking generals are denouncing the repeated bombing of
innocent Chechens as unconstitutional, barbarous and a political
disaster.

In a January 1990 editorial, George Will observed that "[t]he
contrast between Lithuania's arguments now and South
Carolina's then [in 1860] is striking, beginning with the fact
that Carolinians wanted secession to preserve slavery, whereas
Lithuanians want secession to escape it." He wrote "The best the
Soviet Union can hope for is the choice between imploding and
exploding." If Gorbachev didn't choose. Will suggested, the Soviet
Union "would suffer both fates — implosion and explosion—

669

simultaneously." The same might be said for Russia and Yeltsin
today. Unfortunately, Western policies, by encouraging both
internal repression and external expansion, make both fates more
likely.

Secretary of State Warren Christopher's immediate reaction
to the bombing and shelling of Chechen civilians was to express
"sympathy" for Yeltsin — the bombardier. He had only " done what
he had to do to prevent [Chechnya] from breaking away." He was
as "restrained as [he] could be." In 1995, as in 1991, West European
and U.S. leaders are blindly resolved to -preserve the integrity of states
whose subjects have to be bombed into subjection. Western leaders
expressing pious concerns about the killing of Chechen innocents
resisting Russian domination cannot escape all responsibility for it
if they insist on Russia's unconditional right to keep the Chechens
in subjection.

So, while Bill Clinton and Warren Christopher are saying
it's an "internal affair" for Russia, Russian democrats and some
top Russian generals are saying that, in the days of instant global
television, no slaughter of innocent civilians is an internal affair.

The situation in Chechnya, a place that Boris Yeltsin vows to
cleanse of "gangsters" — using the word broadly enough to apply
to any Chechen who resists — is an affair that is neither local nor
confined to Russia. Its ramifications extend far beyond Chechnya,
to other Russian republics and to now-independent former Soviet
republics (FSRs) where Yeltsin and Kozyrev have been using the
latest incarnation of the KGB, as well as Russian troops acting
as "peacekeepers," to stir up ethnic conflicts that drive civilians
on all sides from their homes and leave Russian troops in place,
frequently on former Soviet military bases. Yeltsin's assaults on
Chechnya and the FSRs, moreover, are closely related to Milosevic' s
cleansing of non-Serbs from former Yugoslav republics and from
Kosovo, an internal part of Serbia seized in 1913, to which two U.S.
administrations have inconsistently issued a guarantee against
Serbian attack.

Milosevic was the only European head of state who sent a
letter of congratulations to the plotters of the August 1991 coup
in the Soviet Union. Yeltsin, who was at the top of the plotters'
hit list, denounced Milosevic's barbarism; in April 1992 Yeltsin
joined the U.S. in voting for UN sanctions against Serbia for its
seizure of land and "forcible expulsions" designed to "change
the ethnic composition of the population" of Bosnia and its
"continued expulsion of non-Serb civilians" from Croatia. There

670

was no doubt about the source of the genocidal aggression.
But the steady retreat of Western mediators from even a show
of enforcing the sanctions against Serbia that prohibit Serbia's
continued reinforcement and resupply of its proxies in Bosnia and
Croatia, taught Yeltsin and Kozyrev they could answer Russian
critics of their Western bias against asserting Russian interests in
East Europe and the FSRs by adopting the critics' own program
of Great Russian expansion — and still could be "Western." Until
late in the assault on Chechnya, U.S. and other Western leaders
have largely ignored fears of Russia expressed by the newly
independent states and some Russian republics. And Western
"mediation" has helped Milosevic create a Greater Serbia.

Russia soon became the most overt supplier of the tools of
war that Serbia was sending to its proxies in Bosnia and Croatia.
By the summer of 1994 Yeltsin and Kozyrev had announced that
Russia had no international borders other than those of the former
Soviet Union; and they have made clear that Russia's sphere of
interest extends to its "near abroad" and beyond that— even to
Bosnia and Croatia, which have never been in Moscow's sphere
of interest. Milosevic's Greater Serbia had become the model for
the Greater Russia of Yeltsin and Kozyrev.

In fact, the assault on Chechnya resembles in detail Milosevic's
1991 assault on Croatia: for example, his use of fifth columns and
paramilitary and military forces from Serbia (initially in disguise
and then used openly to "separate" the combatants); the bombing
into rubble of hospitals and other buildings in Croatian towns
like Vukovar; brazenly silly claims that it was the victims who
were bombing and shelling their own women and children and
their own slender means of defense; the offer of cease-fires as a
means of disarming the victims; and, above all, the use of terror to
drive out the population of strategic towns. All to be repeated in
Bosnia.

For some time now, Russia, as a member of the Contact
Group, has surpassed the Europeans in openly supporting
a confederation of Serbia with its proxies. The confederation
would make sure that a heavily-armed Serbia will continue after
the Contact Group "peace" to send soldiers and war materials
to complete the creation of a contiguous Greater Serbia at the
expense of Bosnia and Croatia, which the Contact Group persists
in trying to deprive of arms.

Western governments supported Gorbachev against Yeltsin
in the years leading up to the August coup, just as they now back

671

Yeltsin against any alternative. But they are mistaken now, just
as they were then, to support an individual rather than a path
of evolution towards democracy, free markets and conformity
to international norms banning the seizure of territory by force
and genocidal attacks on civilians. Western policy makes it more
likely that Russia will keep moving in the wrong direction.

The expansion of Russian control and influence in its near
and not-so-near abroad has dire implications for the future of
democracy and free markets in Russia, as well as in the FSRs,
and for the future of Russia as a trustworthy "partner" for peace
and for arms control agreements. In fact, the "new democracy
... in the former Soviet Union" referred to by McCurry — unlike
that of Lincoln — has yet to come into being. Russia has a long
way to travel to reach a democratic government with the checks
and balances of a parliament, presidency and judiciary under the
rule of law. Yeltsin has himself said that "Russia comprehends
democracy poorly.... In our history, it has been all or nothing.
Either revolutionary anarchy or a ruthless regime."

It's most unlikely that Yeltsin's repeated bombardments
interlaced with pledges to stop bombing civilians in Grozny
and surrounding villages indicate that he is not in charge — that
General Pavel Grachev, the defense minister, has repeatedly
surprised Yeltsin by disobeying the orders to stop. Yeltsin can
hardly have been repeatedly surprised in Chechnya, as some
pundits suggest; the attacks appeared in Russian media as well
as on CNN International. In Yeltsin's October 1993 confrontation
with the parliament, it was Yeltsin who ordered Grachev to
bring tanks into Moscow to use against parliament. And it was
a reluctant Grachev whom Yeltsin describes as hostage to the
"deeply democratic slogan" that "the army is outside politics."^

Yeltsin made his narrow escape in that confrontation with the
Supreme Soviet by, he says, "formally . . . violating the constitution,
going the route of anti-democratic measures and dispersing the
parliament, all for the sake of establishing democracy and the rule
of law in the country, while the parliament was defending the
constitution in order to overthrow the lawfully elected president."
Yeltsin applies his doubts about parliaments much more widely
than to the Supreme Soviet, the congress conceived by Gorbachev.
He doesn't think much of the "bandits, fascists and criminals" who
make up the Supreme Soviet. He says, with heavy sarcasm, that,
bad as it is, it is no "freak in the wonderful family of parliaments
of the world." His doubts extend to the U.S. Congress:

672

The word congressman, deputy, or senator in various lan-
guages is not surrounded by such a glowing halo. We
have only to recall Mark Twain to realize that this elect-
ed body has long been associated in the minds of West-
ern people with corruption, official sloth, and an inflated
and empty self-importance . . . constantly beset with
scandals and exposes.

But Yelstin is no humorist.

His low opinion of the present Russian parliament — on which
the West relies for ratifying extensions of the Anti-Ballistic Missile
(ABM) Treaty, the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START)
Treaty, etc. — exceed his contempt for the parliament that ratified
the original treaties. Yeltsin says that the latter — Congress's dedicated
arms controllers will he interested to learn — was only "feigning
advocacy for disarmament [and] peace throughout the world. The
present one is "not even pretending to pass itself off as peaceloving, as
its predecessor in the era of Communist stagnation had done." None
of this qualifies Russia as a believable NATO "partner for peace."
Nor as a trustworthy signatory of new treaties on strategic arms
and strategic defense. Nor as a credibly impartial member of a
group working out a "just and lasting peace" in the Balkans.

In the Balkans, the American, British, French, German and
Russian leaders of the five-nation Contact Group have been
trying to compel the acceptance of their continually changing
"take it or leave it" "peace" plan. Jimmy Carter, after three and a
half years of Serbian ethnic cleansing, has made a breakthrough,
we are told, and the State Department has joined him in pressing
Bosnians and Croats to accept. Meanwhile, the Krajina Serbs in
Croatia continue to punctuate Carter's "cease-fire" with cross-
border attacks violating Bosnian and Croatian sovereignty, and
have just stated that their next step will be to unite with the Serbs
in Bosnia and, as a step after that, with Serbia itself.

That just happens to be the Contact Group's deliberately
obscure "peace plan." It would create a contiguous Greater
Serbia. And that, as any fine-grained analysis of the thoroughly
mixed demography shows, means "cleansing" the area of non-
Serbs, severing Croatia, and breaking Bosnia into a half dozen
islands under Serbian siege with no defendable connection with
each other or with the outside world of trade and investment
they need to survive. It would mean increased forced migrations

673

and civil disorder in a Europe whose imperial past has left its
populations irrevocably impure. The overreaching of Eurocrats,
who confidently expected to "solve" the Balkan problem quickly,
has already revived old antagonisms among the members of
the new "united" Europe and has bitterly divided the Atlantic
Alliance.

Ideas for a NATO expanded to the east by the inclusion of
Russia as a "Partner for Peace" as well as the East European and
former Soviet republics appear mutually incompatible rather
than merely Utopian. It is a resurgent, expansive Russia from
whom these FSRs and former members of the Warsaw Pact need
protection.

The last five years of European and American policy for
southeast and east central Europe and for the Former Soviet
Republics have resulted in both implosion and explosion — neither
peace nor containment. It is time for a basic reassessment of policy for
the world emerging from the fall of the Communist dictatorships.

The new Congress is taking as part of its first order of business
hearings for a "Peace Powers Act of 1995" to replace the War
Powers Resolution. It will cast a critical eye on the wild growth
of "peacekeeping" where there is no peace to keep. What most
urgently needs consideration, based on Balkan recent history, is
the assurance that no American forces will be used in peacekeep-
ing operations inconsistent with the UN Charter and the Conven-
tion Against Genocide: that they will not be used to consolidate a
country's hold on territory seized by violence; that they will not
facilitate the cleansing from that territory of any ethnic group;
and that American forces will be able to achieve a clearly defined
political objective and to defend themselves without fear of veto
by any country supporting the aggressor. Congress should also
consider imposing constraints on the billions of dollars now
used, directly or by way of international organizations such as
the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank, to support
"peacekeeping" operations by other countries which do not meet
the above criteria.

In hearings on a "Bosnia and Herzegovina Self-Defense Act,"
Congress will review the increasingly zany political arguments
advanced by the Mitterrand and Major governments for continu-
ing an arms embargo that never validly applied to Bosnia since it
violates the inherent rights of Bosnia, a recognized, independent
member of the UN, to receive arms for its self-defense. The Clinton
administration, at its outset, strongly opposed the embargo, but
characteristically reversed itself under European pressure, just

674

when European policies in the Balkans and the embargo itself had
become admitted failures. The administration now is making an
all-out effort to silence doubts and to muster the Pentagon and the
intelligence community in support of the failed policy.

Besides rigorously examining the old bad arguments for
starving the victims of means of self-defense, the new Congress
should outflank the administration by going to the heart of the
problem: the persistent failure of Europe and the UN bureaucracy,
since May 1992, even to try enforcing the valid ban on Serbia's
reinforcement and resupply of its proxies in Bosnia and Croatia.
Russia has been in the lead of Britain and France in an effort to
legalize Serbia's reinforcement and resupply of its proxies, even
though that puts U.S. and other NATO airmen as well as UN
peacekeepers at risk and would make even riskier a complex and
dangerous operation of withdrawing them.

That operation in particular would bring out an essential
connection between the changes these two pieces of legislation
should make. For a dangerous operation engaging so many
American foot soldiers and airmen, it would be essential for U.S.
commanders to be in control of the campaign and to be able to
decide (without UN second-guessing) on when, where and how
to suppress enemy capabilities to disrupt the operation and inflict
serious harm on our own and allied forces.

ENDNOTES - Wohlstetter - Boris Yeltsen as Abraham Lincoln?

1. As Yeltsin writes: "Grachev raised his hand and addressed
me, slowly squeezing out the words: 'Boris Nikolayevich, are
you giving me sanction to use tanks in Moscow?' I looked at him
in silence. . . . 'I'll send you a written order'." See Boris Yeltsin,
The Struggle for Russia, trans. Catherin A. Fitzpatrick, New York:
Times Books, 1994, p. 278.

675

ABOUT THE EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS

Robert Zarate is a Research Fellow at the Nonproliferation Policy
Education Center in Washington, DC. He previously worked as
a policy analyst of controls on encryption and other dual-use
goods at Steptoe & Johnson LLP. Mr. Zarate has published essays
and articles on national security, technology, politics, law, and
business in The Weekly Standard, 'National Review Online, Wired
News, and other publications. Most recently, he contributed an
essay, "The NPT, IAEA Safeguards and Peaceful Nuclear Energy:
An 'Inalienable Right,' But Precisely to What?" to Falling Behind:
International Scrutiny of the Peaceful Atom (2008), a volume edited
by Henry Sokolski. Mr. Zarate earned his undergraduate and
graduate degrees from the University of Chicago.

Henry Sokolski is the Executive Director of the Nonproliferation
Policy Education Center (NPEC), a Washington-based nonprofit
founded in 1994 to promote a better understanding of strategic
weapons proliferation issues. He currently teaches courses on
nuclear issues at the Institute of World Politics in Washington.
He recently served on the Congressional Commission on the
Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and
Terrorism to which he was appointed in 2008. Prior to that, he
served on the Commission to Assess the Organization of the Federal
Government to Combat the Proliferation of Weapons of Mass
Destruction, chaired by former Director of Central Intelligence
John Deutch; and on the CIA's Senior Advisory Board. From
1989 to 1993, Mr. Sokolski worked in the Pentagon as Deputy for
Nonproliferation Policy and received a medal for distinguished
service. Earlier, he worked in the Department of Defense for the
Director of Net Assessment on weapons proliferation issues,
and in the U.S. Senate as an aide on nuclear energy matters and
military affairs. Mr. Sokolski has authored and edited several
volumes on military and foreign, affairs including Best oflntentions:
America's Campaign Against Strategic Weapons Proliferation (2001).
He attended the University of Southern California and Pomona
College, and received his graduate education at the University of
Chicago.

677

Alain C. Enthoven is the Marriner S. Eccles Professor of Public
and Private Management, Emeritus, at Stanford University, and
a core faculty member at Stanford's Center for Health Policy
and Center for Primary Care and Outcomes Research (CHP/
PCOR). During the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Dr.
Enthoven served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for
Systems Analysis from 1961 to 1965, and as Assistant Secretary
of Defense for Systems Analysis from 1965 to 1969. He received
the President's Award for Distinguished Federal Civilian Service
from President John F. Kennedy in 1963. Dr. Enthoven describes
his work and methodological approach within the Pentagon's
Office of Systems Analysis in How Much is Enough? Shaping the
Defense Program, 1961-1969, a book which he co-authored with K.
Wayne Smith in 1971, and a new edition of which was published
by the RAND Corporation in 2005. Dr. Enthoven was a RAND
Corporation economist between 1956 and 1960. He received his
B.A. from Stanford University in 1952, an M.Phil, from the Oxford
University in 1954, and a Ph.D. from MIT in 1956. He is a member
of the Institute of Medicine, a fellow of the American Academy of
Arts and Sciences, and a former Rhodes Scholar.

Stephen J. Lukasik is a Distinguished Senior Research Fellow at
the Center for International Strategy, Technology, and Policy,
at Georgia Institute of Technology. Dr. Lukasik, as a member
of the Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects
Agency (ARPA, now DARPA) in the early 1960s, was responsible
for research in support of nuclear test ban negotiations. From
1967 to 1974, he served as the Deputy Director, and later as the
Director, of ARPA, and was awarded the Defense Department's
Distinguished Service Medal in 1973. He also served as Chief
Scientist of the Federal Communications Commission from 1979
to 1982. Dr. Lukasik subsequently served as a consultant with
SAIC for about 14 years, a Visiting Fellow at Stanford University's
Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) and
a Visiting Professor of International Affairs at the Sam Nunn
School of International Affairs at Georgia Tech. He received a B.S.
in physics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the Ph.D. in
physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

678

Andrew W. Marshall is the founder of the Office of Net Assessment
in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and has served as its
director since 1973. He worked as an economist at the RAND
Corporation from the late 1940s until the early 1970s. Mr. Marshall
earned his graduate degree in economics from the University of
Chicago.

Richard Perle is Resident Fellow at the American Enterprise
Institute for Public Policy Research in Washington, DC. Previously
he served as Chairman of the Defense Policy Board from 2001 to
2003; as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security
Policy from 1981 to 1987; and as a member of the U.S. Senate staff,
working for Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson (D-WA) from 1969 to
1980. Mr. Perle writes frequently for the op-ed pages of The New
York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, The Daily Telegraph
(London), Jerusalem Post, and other publications. He is the co-
author of An End to Evil (2003), and author of Hard Line (1992), a
political novel. Mr. Perle earned his B.A. in International Politics
from University of Southern California in 1964, and his M.A in
Politics from Princeton University in 1967.

Henry S. Rowen is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, a
professor of public policy and management emeritus at Stanford
University's Graduate School of Business, and a member of
Stanford University's Asia/Pacific Research Center. He was
Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs in
the U.S. Department of Defense from 1989 to 1991, and earlier from
1961 to 1965. He was also Chairman of the National Intelligence
Council from 1981 to 1983. He served as president of the RAND
Corporation from 1967 to 1972, and was assistant director, U.S.
Bureau of the Budget, from 1965 to 1966. Mr. Rowen served on the
Secretary of Defense's Policy Advisory Board from 2001 to 2004.
From 2004 to 2005, he served on the Presidential Commission
on the Intelligence of the United States Regarding Weapons of
Mass Destruction. He earned a Bachelor's degree in industrial
management from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
in 1949, and a Master's in economics from Oxford University in
1955.

679

Internet Archive Audio

Featured

Top

Images

Featured

Top

Software

Featured

Top

Texts

Featured

Top

Video

Featured

Top

Mobile Apps

Browser Extensions

Archive-It Subscription

Save Page Now

Full text of "After Iraq: The Search for a Sustainable National Security Strategy"

See other formats